A.P. Swearengin

In the dead of the night, far northeastern Kansas, middle of winter, everything is cold. The open air moves briskly through the leafless, dead trees; silence is nearly provoked by the softening snow, yet a slow rumble from the highway muffles its last calls into the night. Wrapped in layers of breathable clothing, you struggle not to be enveloped by the low light of the street lamps, dimly lighting the harsh, wintry, lifeless night. Down to the weightless crunch of snow beneath my feet, my unconscious nerves struggle to feel any movement in my entire body.

I live for these moments, they are so unmistakably beautiful that it is sometimes literally a physical manifestation of beauty, and it hits hard, right in the gut. I may be mistaken to say that everyone has had some kind of experience similar to my own, yet maybe you have found a beauty within an early morning excursion in the mountains of Virginia, or in the lost horizon of the infinite ocean. Waking up to the lulling sun over the not so rolling plains of Kansas, or feeling the unsteady grains of sand beneath your feet, after cliff jumping into a river in rural Pennsylvania. I like to think that these experiences, so ordain, yet beautiful on their own, truly represent something greater, something possibly lost in the business of our society today. We so often memorialize, and glorify these experiences and the feeling of nostalgia, that perhaps we have now grown numb to the idea of its possible influence. This interpretation of nostalgia is more likely, than not, to be presented through the eyes of the self, (which I am very guilty of) it’s about ones own connection with life, and their past experiences, and sometimes I think we can’t excuse or get rid of ourselves in the equation, mostly because it is really hard to see the world through the eyes of another or none other. Especially in art, we are very interested in self-exploration, but what I have been interested in lately is how possible could it be for these experiences to continue to happen, and these moments to still exist, if the collective memory or intelligent thought were to be taken out of the equation. Like the ancient Buddhist koans would ask, “If a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If an intelligent species such as human beings weren’t around to question these moments of beauty, and try to understand them, would they still hold significance, or in some cases even cease to exist at all?

I have been exploring this concept in my visual work, through a relationship I’m trying to create between the viewer and the piece of work, or more importantly the concept at hand, by physically putting the viewer into the piece itself. So, the viewer consequently “completes” or acts out the fulfilling quality of the work. I am questioning this idea that if the intelligent being (the viewer) were to be taken away from or out of the piece, that the piece itself couldn’t exist, or possibly wouldn’t exist. I am trying to understand if the viewer themselves are what give art and beauty importance, or if art and beauty are important anyway, and we are simply given the ability to enjoy it.

Selected Work