Awhile ago, Harriet Sundström painted scenes of hunters foregrounded by their hounds with prey, often rabbits. For as much conceptual art school as I could barely stomach after starting in on Kant around age 14 (a bit late to philosophy by Nordic standards), I began to delight and stand wide eyed in a bewildered horror at the complexity of colloquialisms evident in traditional painting, graphics, and screen printing.

Never could I have imagined the decentering and deconstructionist idealism practiced at graduate school, pieced together by American Academia from the Frankfurt school would have sent me, literally and actually, down a rabbit hole. Several of my close friends affectionately prodded if I was digging a hole to China these last years and if that was really a good idea. The thing about digging deep through history and understanding semiotics and the symbolism operating on the level of appearance in our daily lives, at a certain point, less energy is required to keep digging than to backtrack through the center of the earth.

While that all sounds like metaphor-ary, I also experienced this dig not only psychologically but somatically, within and around my body and life story. It was as if the notion life as a dream was real, and that dream included a malleability of the contents of life based on the choices made at a soul level. There were no compass or guides…but instead objects, signs, gut signals, conflicting evidence to try to distinguish what was illusion and what was real.

Now as if this didn’t sound like a bad trip, I assure you; I have avoided burning man and drugs in this life. Life is already trippy enough…perhaps due in large to my curiosity and tolerance. Colloquial phrases, as it turns out have material meaning. And so I took an interest to the symbolism of art, particularly of those who spend time to develop skill to select their subject matter carefully. This is not to say abstract paintings cannot have as much consideration, but that there were often gross mishandlings due to posturing and conceptual whims that left my soul empty these days in art. I know I’m not alone. Most people say this in whispers to me, but dare not speak aloud to the imaginary board of esteemed art officials.

Before I drift off into the imaginary realms of ‘art worlds’ to avoid sharing with you my personal symbols…here are some of my personal symbols to begin to scratch upon the coinciding experiences that indeed felt like a kind of dying was occurring.

Dead rabbits….as if to say what? Dead rabbits appearing in waking life seemed like a warning sign to me to be careful which trails to follow. Sometimes ignorance is not bliss (rarely if ever) but ignorance could mean avoiding intersections with predatory creatures that apparently kill for fun…such as this beautiful bunny found on an evening walk as if in mid stride…just there. A hungry animal could have at least used the creature, but this sweetheart was just there casting a soft shadow of a mountain from the streetlamp in its last moments of breath. I struggle so much coming upon these creatures, as if hugging them might help them revive their breath. Alas, their softness and delicate beauty I am taught to not touch, particularly moments after death. I don’t know if rabbits really are dangerous or if dying creatures are either. I do not look upon the dead rabbits my deceased relative painted now as triumph of survival but this weighty reverence for the transmutation of one form of life that becomes loss as transferred to a greater ether despite weighing upon the temporary scale of a cement sidewalk.

The Matches. This simple box of matches inspires horror in my heart. It’s only now writing this I notice 10 matches in each direction, 5 one way, 5 the other. When I looked up these on the internet, I found they are still manufactured in The Netherlands, though were indeed Swedish. The reason I still feel so scared of this symbol today is their being seems to defy the realms of reason which I rely upon to reassure myself of reality’s existence. Despite toying around with notions of spooky action at a distance, space-time collapsing, and Schrödinger's cat, these were fun as mere metaphysical and equivocal theories until the reality of this matchbox’s appearance in my life. Thankfully I have witnesses, prior to these photos made with my iphone. Not to be dramatic, but I heard a THWAK while I was preparing for bed one evening in Santa Monica. Hearing something fall to the floor and wondering what or how, I looked around. As a well known minimalist and type-a clean personality, what could have fallen? I opened the cabinets and the drawers of the bathroom, checked the shower for falled soaps or loofas….nothing. The last place I looked was under the waste bin, which had about a 1/2inch inset in the bottom, to find a matchbox under the bin. There is nothing within the realm of reason that produces a sound of an item falling that would already be contained within that small of a space. A sound that inspired my roommate at the time to ask if everything was ok…to which when I showed her the matchbox, she giggled…well isn’t that funny. I asked why, and she said she had never seen them before and they clearly looked quite old. And indeed the box appeared to be from decades ago, perhaps during WWII. Part of me wishes I held onto the box, but another part of me was glad to leave them in the bathroom when I moved out of that apartment.

Now here is what intensive blood work looks like. For about 6 years, I had several vials of blood drawn, along with MRI scans, ultrasounds, physical therapy and alternative treatments and exams such as massage, biopathy, sensory deprivation, all of which to find out why on earth my immune system was malfunctioning. The doctor in the USA I saw in Culver City, put my copay in his pocket. Randal Gilbert…I’ll never forget how 10 minute visit with some blood tests gave him the idea to diagnose me with a life threatening condition, of which I found out in Norway to not even carry the genetic factor for having. Thankfully what I can point to as intuition for lack of knowing what the impulse was, told me to get second opinions. Blood labs seem more reasonable to me than the matchbox event…alas, just as spooky as at one point my blood was watery, kool-aid consistency, and slowly over years, and even many blood draws, began to deepen and thicken to a more “normal” consistency. The quality of my blood also coincided with the vigor and strength regained over those 6 years. I will save you the graphic image of the bloody noses I would wake with in the middle of the night, or the time I was out to see a choir perform at the Black Box Theater in Oslo, with my friend Maya, and how she called another friend, Enzo, to help because the blood was filling the sink, and I was going into shock and panic wondering why. The people assumed I was on drugs; but yet again, I don’t take drugs…so what was creating this in my life?

Then there is the whole allergy to cats (I am); and the notion of the shadow in Jungian psychology, as well as mirroring in Buddhism and other theological orders. Combine the shadow with the meridians we know now as vascular and nerve channels stemming from the organs in the body, the somatic and physical (real) experiences were indeed expressions of some kind of psyche. And in etymology, psyche means spirit. Spiritual signs, attacks, were realms of darkness in Orthodoxy, and the occult or just cults in general were things I avoided like drugs…who would knowingly invite trouble into their life?

One of the external signs was the categorization in Norway for the things I was examined for being in the wing for women and children. What kind of things are women and children historically subjected to? That does not require much imagination now does it? or even a new painting? The horrors humans survive is so widely known….how few abstract symbols are required for people to paint the image in their minds? (and really, as a true question and not a rhetorical prod: do you require a finished image, or does your mind draw up images on its own?)

Inside the clinic were these forms that reminded me of foxes. The fox was a creature, along with some kinds of birds, I understood as having significance in certain lineages, but animals signs are not something I am expert at. Between the fox sightings and encounters, there was also this moment with a bird in the Palisades Park that did not seem real. I felt like it was telling me to stay away at the moment I took the image, and just days later there was a shooting near the Camera Obscura which is where I was walking by. That was quite upsetting as I had been applying to teach workshops there, and so nature was being very blunt with me: my wishes did not matter if I wanted to stay alive.

And then this paintbrush…which looks badly beaten up, appeared in the floorboards of the car I drove. This was also spooky in its improbability because the car had electric seats, and so there was this plastic shell connecting the chair to the floor with very narrow openings for the moulding to slide across the cut carpeting. Unless someone had gotten into the car while I was not driving, how else does a paintbrush that was not there before simply appear to be on the floor? I had not taken passengers in the vehicle, so this was yet another object and possibly symbol that appeared during this particularly spooky series of events during 2016.

And so finally; we have social media filters which also create another layer of mythos upon that which is actually transpiring to confuse folks. The last image was from Instagram filter for Time magazine cover…with 2 suitcases. I had gotten one for my love, and the other I had owned. Color-wise my suitcase aims to fulfill that which I lack while traveling: grounding. The orange was the suitcase I had imagined my love would use, and the two seem to create a flame. I do not know if orange really represents confidence, or red grounding, as all colour meanings are culturally made up…..

So I wonder about the signs, matches, bunnies, paint brushes…these objects which are tools, and yet part of our everyday lives, they are more metaphysical and perhaps subtle pointers towards familial or heritage patterns life is asking us to examine. I figure I cannot be the only person that has had very surreal experiences that are somehow freaky in their inexplicable nature. And in the very off chance I was, what would the anomaly in a data set say? Would the erroneous information be disregarded as insignificant or obsolete? is nature that discriminatory, or is the omniscient energy of life more subtle than that? Meaning…if everything does matter, then these materials emerged from whatever poor understandings we (or I) have of space and time into what I photograph and point as reality. So what really made these things happen? Perhaps the explanations are still yet to come, and despite as spooky as that sounds, I sleep intensely well at night. For whatever life wants me to work out for its own development has sure demanded a significant chunk of my cognitive queries, and perhaps spawned new questions in your mind- which might even be the whole point of their occurrence…for me to transmit the symbols through their story is only sensible or even close to linear since I lived them, otherwise the non-locality of life feels so chaotic, reason could feel like a straightjacket.

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