My goals as an artist coincide with my goals as a person. My goals as a person include primarily a discovery of the self, the self I was thrown into and have been becoming and will be becoming until my heart eventually stops pumping oxygen to my life systems and I begin to become a tree or grass or particles of dust sinking to the bottom of the ocean. It is through this process of discovering myself that I discover everything else. We are all bubbles of matter and interactions floating in space bumping into each other and the world around us, collecting dust and stains and giving and taking and exploring until we pop and become a soft whisper in the cosmic night of nothingness and everything. Thus it is as a circle, making Venn diagrams with everything and everyone that I travel. The artifacts of this journey are the things that have come to be known as art. I find such definitions as confining the cacophony of the excitations and sublimations that peer beneath the sunset or peak behind the moon to wink and pop in the night. There are paths to worthy discovery and genuine knowledge and understanding in the world, the kind that lead to winding roads up chimney slopes and clouds of fluffy twirling singing notions of things forgotten and remembered. There exist truth, there is a hand on a keyboard and that hand exists or it does not. That may be as far as I can go right now; truth is a rare commodity in this green green world. It was long ago discovered that our fellow human can be led, that their actions can be corralled and their mind subverted to the desires and service of others. The conquest of the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few has been a landslide defeat for the abused for thousands of years and this is the struggle I concern myself with: the revealing of falsehood, the destruction of privilege for the sake of Truth and Justice. This struggle is one we are all a part of. We all have a place in this world of deceit. We are either among the rotting corpses traveling in carts pulled by our slain brethren toward the mountainous walls of the crushed wills surrounding the castle of our keepers or we are dragging our broken bodies to the peaks of some forgotten shore to bask and bath in the sunlight.
Happiness and joy as well. We are all a part of this fabric of people, of time and place. All of our names are carved onto the wall. It is joy and happiness that fuels the engine of self discovery and reveals the world. It is the joy I feel in my entire self that brings sorrow and rage to my brow. It is through my happiness that I see sadness. Being content with the world may be impossible but at least some things make sense in smiles, in laughter. The world contains delightful moments of rapture and beauty, of the sublime and blissful. There are moments that take our very being and for a rare instance we vibrate in unison with everything. If it were not for the joy and happiness that can be found I would have nothing to offer but happiness in a warm gun. I want to reveal the world to those who cannot see it in order to bring about more well being. I want to find freedom for myself so that I can show others how to find it for themselves’ and us all. My art is joy and tyranny.
Daniel Guarnieri