EXTANT POSSIBILITY

"Extant Possibility"
subtitled: "intentional misuse of this dimensional portal...?"
acrylic on fabric + stretcher
30" x 18"
benjamin harubin 2007

UPDATE: sharper picture! (thanks, Joe)


sometimes i can't resist providing the exegesis, but true art lovers can skip the following:

The possibility that is extant, despite the contradiction, is the functioning of the human mind. 
Art is the transportation of the dreamer (the viewer) to another dimension.
It does this through the use of the Magic Window or dimensional portal, aka the Proscenium. 
If you object to the notion that this painting could be seen as some kind of device that could literally transport you to another dimension 
(probably some Lovecraftian eldritch dimension where the laws of physics are different than ours and strange biomorphic creatures spew fluids) 
then i challenge you to present the schematics of what consciousness is exactly and how it does its magic trick.  
Modernism, in the effort to explain everything materially, has declaimed Meaning as shadow and cheap tricks (reflected in the humble approach to materials in this piece).  
Instead it has focused on the material presentation (the naked thing itself). [even though Modernism in art officially ended sometime in the decade after WWII, we are still living its legacy]
Yet meaning persists.  
But i prefer to use the term "function" as opposed to "meaning":  
Even the most abstract presentation in art cannot escape meaning- in the way that it functions in society and in the human mind, with the clustered referents it utilizes.  
And so art of all sorts guides you on your path through life, patterning your ideas of what is and is not physically possible.  
This path, btw, is the one that leads through the desert of dehydrated functionality towards the Reintegration.  
In the Reintegration, specialized areas of human endeavor (art, religion, science, politics) will no longer be seen as separate, but as aspects of the pattern-recognizing, model building and information processing human mind that is our interface with the universe (i.e., the rest of the universe, i.e., new information, i.e., food).  
This is post-apocalyptic art, for this is now the apocalypse, and it's time to move on.  

and please don't snark me on the intentional misuse of italics.