© JESS X CHEN 2009

RISD TWO SIDED DRAWING, PART 1
RISD HOMETEST
Undergraduate Admission 2009
| 16"x"20 | 30 hours

Please see, Part II - [link]

Dripping from the hundred-boned flexibility of my hands is a river of muse I have been chasing for my whole life without ever knowing its’ source. The portfolio of work that has cascaded from the core of this chase, not only took three years to make, but 17 years – the brevity of my entire life, to learn how to. Admittedly, my greatest fear is the end of this chase – the final rejection or feather of failure that’d break the artists’ back -- the victory of practicality over the romantic ideals of artistry that all my youth has led me to embody. This fear has been incarnated on a 16”x20” piece of paper in the form of monstrous octopi and sharks, mouths opening up to a starving darkness, wholly alien and horrifying to the small of my screaming body.

On the other side of the paper, is an image of my desperate hand in the darkness of a shark’s massive jaws – flexing for an escape, and struggling to be saved. Those fingers still stretch with an utter refusal to surrender and a frantic urgency to keep persevering, and keep holding on. Though my fears tell me otherwise, as far as my seventeen-year-old body knows, my flexing hands will always be reaching -- and I will never, for a moment, let go.


Please see, Part II - [link]
to view the piece in it's whole entirety.