"I'd Be In Heaven Now, If It Weren't For Hell"
TITLE - "I'd Be In Heaven Now, If It Weren't For Hell"
WHERE - Vancouver, British Columbia (2014)
ABOUT THE GALLERY, MISFIT DESIRES
As John Milton observed, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." This doleful gallery is a crazy-quilted bestiary of things in life that many of us seek but that are rooted in misconceptions and fantasies, or that are ultimately unwise for us to want and uncongenial to our spiritual contentment, or that are fleeting or asymptotic and inherently impossible to attain, or else, if attained, that are unlikely in the end to be what we really wanted.
Our tour begins with modes of desire that can lead to unhappy ways of being. It then forays into sketchy aspects of lust and romance (among straights and gays); and finally stumbles headlong into a dog's breakfast of other, un-tasty infatuations and addictions. Mankind's misfit desires are as innumerable as the chaff in the field, as you know, so what follows here amounts to little more than the cheaply bought, one-pound Whitman's sampler of contemporary human folly. Spreading out from this crossroads, a handful of especially rough roads to paradise lost.
(Hungry for still more circus? Consider the daft arrogance of religions and the low paranoia of tribes.)