matthewsloly.com/raw.html Home | CV | Links | Contact Raw 1996, Video-loop, 4 second cycle, dimensions variable, collection of the NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (Click image to view QuickTime movie) Though headless, armless, and legless, its entire body an orifice or open wound, something in this pupal bag of viscera is still able to be engaged in a desperate, yet strangely comic, Sisyphusian struggle with the incomprehensibility of it's predicament, just on the threshold of it's (or is it our) natural senses, and their technological extensions. Amoeboid yet strangely human, it ‘s squirming evokes a certain anxiety about how the extension of our nervous systems simultaneously into macroscopic and microscopic space/time scales is conflating and sometimes exploding the conceptual framework through which we perceive the world. It is natural - instinctual - to feel a certain fear of what is, in a very real way, our dissolution, or rather, the implicit threat of a dissolution of the conventions by which we produce self-recognition. This is an entity struggling to recognize itself after a cataclysmic disorientation. Monsters like this have always been depicted lurking at the periphery of the known.