MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

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E N T R Y  D A T E  |  S U M M E R  2 0 2 3

There exists no shortage of platforms on which to render one's subjective experience into a thing consumable to the masses. And yet, the echo chamber of social media, once a microphone that soothed the desire to be seen - feels less intimate than ever. Our timelines are rife with context; liked or unliked, shared or unshared. As such, we review these pages of our past with almost no ability to remain immersed in the undeveloped negative of our own memory. Our story is saturated by the printed presence of AUDIENCE.

As an experiment with speaking into the void, I have long considered evolving a means with which to share a more individual approach. Not simply a copy and paste, but a refocusing of the lens of select posts that whisper from the past. I look at this offering as a collage of images and memories both profound and abstruse, a retelling of a journey and of a present that is instigated to exist simply for the purpose of calling thought into being. I hope that however unacknowledged, both the path and the puzzle fit within the shape of something greater. I am relying on that possibility, alone, as a reward enough.

NEW FROM THE DESK OF ANDREW SLOANE

NEW FROM THE DESK OF ANDREW SLOANE

I AM NOT A-SLOANE

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E  N  T  R  Y   D  A  T  E   |   S U M M E R   2  0  2  3

I look to SOLITUDE as a spiritual practice to find a kind of borrowed BALANCE. The unpredictable nature of an artist’s lifestyle can not be ignored: A perpetual uncertainty about the future is formidable. In a vocation that shifts with the seasons, it seems the only element in our lives that remains the same is CHANGE itself.

We must, then, cultivate an ever-evolving solution to control our reaction to it. The preparation for and anticipation of this volatile career is an endless practice. Yet ironically, the same quest for creative and spiritual fulfillment that drives one to a life of artistry is the very thing that can sustain oneself in it. I must seek continuously to LOOK WITHIN.

Manifested more practically, this translates to time alone spent in dialogue with the topics that fascinate me: Consciousness, Wisdom Traditions, Metaphysics, Esoterisms, The Occult, and beyond. The conceptual mysteries interest me the most. It is with these lofty notions, explored seemingly alone in the dark, that I use to approach a more pragmatic, daily reality of equal mystery.

ESCAPE FROM 2020

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E N T R Y  D A T E   |    M A Y  2 0 2 3

To pluck the rose that is beauty is to grasp the thorn that is pain. Who could know, hidden behind these photos lay the darkest days of a pandemic and the crippling end to a poignant relationship? It is not abnormal that many of the seemingly ugliest moments of my life coupled simultaneously with a ferocious grasping onto the manufacture of IMAGE. The heart is heightened in its breaking and can be silenced by little other than the pouring out of oneself into form. I could not survive alone in my West Coast apartment within the overarching vibration of a greater aloneness. Over the course of months, I risked my physical health in favor of my mental and returned home to attach myself to a more concrete reality of the things I loved.

I know of fewer examples of arresting purity than the face of a child at play. Trapped within their continual motion, can be the flicker of action and actor as one. Children are not as separate from the world as we are, especially while the very earth appeared to reject us. In the course of a summer that nearly broke me, I gathered an album full of playful images I look back to often. The look in their eyes may have shifted in its quality of light since then. It gathers a faintness of fire.

LIFE AND STYLE

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E  N  T  R  Y   D  A  T  E   |   S U M M E R   2  0  2  3

Living beautifully is a meditation we enact in our own spaces as a ritual and a kind of therapy. As children, the hunt to cultivate our own environment is instinct - yet I can pinpoint the very morning in which I cemented a desire to craft visual moments that begged to be noticed. The setting is my childhood bedroom and the props include scissors, a vase, and unfortunately for my mother - an uprooted bush from our yard’s plant bed.

Inspired no doubt by something I had seen on television, and cloaked in the dark of the night, I had taken what started as a living hedge and sculpted it into a (now dying), spherical TOPIARY. It sat proudly atop my desk, the vessel adorned in painted ornamentation. I love to consider the youthful and unconventional thinking necessary to risk punishment in favor of reproducing an otherwise silly object. How urgent and intoxicating it must have been to enliven such a thing so instantly; a haze that would fade with a sober reality of repercussion.

This may have been the beginning of innumerable nights of wild free association that continues to this day. It has always started with an observation, an idea, an urgency, an evening, and with something close to GRASP. Sometimes it results in a kind of punishment. But mostly a kind of pride.

MEXICO: HOT SET!

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E N T R Y  D A T E  |  S U M M E R  2 0 2 3

Traveling on the job consistently intrigued me while in the pursuit of a career in TV - a dream on top of a dream as it were. In the machine of Union Narrative Television, the prospects vary; many rarely depart the sanctuary of New York or Los Angeles while others can live out of a suitcase for years on end.

The romantic anticipation of the experience, upon arrival, can be chased out unsuspectingly by the reality of a taxing job experience, unchanged from that which was left on the shore of departure. While still VERY much a great privilege, the mind is a tricky thing. How quickly a tropical beach can go ignored while lamenting sleep deprivation. Our eyes become almost blind to the saturated color that stunned us at first sight. For all its perceived glamour, we ultimately find ourselves still part of a machine.

The entertainment business is about cultivating a fantasy, but to do that takes heightened attention to reality. At breakneck speed and with every minute made of money, we fabricate elaborately coordinated conditions to play host to a fiction that must be absorbed as spontaneous fact. The new world that is the location around us becomes yet another detail in that drama to be controlled.

I lean on these trappings not out of pessimism but to contrast a sensation that supersedes them all. For all the exhaustive effort and mess of the moment, what remains is unparalleled access to diverse cultures - and the kind of memories that can leave you asking: “Was I REALLY there?”