PROJECT

the toast

Inspired by the mythology of Bacchanalia, The Toast is a collection of composite photographs depicting a room-sized glass sculpture installation.

Owing to our form of consciousness, it is inevitable that we recognize the puzzling and mostly terrifying fact of our mortality, and in turn, a dreadful paradox: we exist to live, and merely live to die. The development of countless mythologies of death transcendence are in service of consoling this anxiety, though not all such narratives entertain particularly abstract rationalizations. The Toast presents a sculpture installation (or shrine) dedicating perhaps the most primal and appealing of these concepts – immortality.

For a species that profits from quantifiable descriptions of the world, the proposal of an infinite self is of ironic value: while an inutile assertion about nature, it is an indispensable pacifier for our existential nature. Such contradiction is also typical to notions of supernatural continuance, and to signify this entwinement the artwork refers to a Dionysian tableau, invoking the god Nietzsche regarded “symbolic of the tragic contrast within all things.”

The anxieties of mortality salience and the palliative effect of immortality mythologies are together embodied by the character Dionysus, dramatized in the accounts of madness and ecstasy his presence is fabled to induce. Both a diagnosis of consciousness’s turmoil and a principal treatment for it, his is a myth in advocacy of myth and a tortured recognition of the sublime liberation we have found in narrative itself. 

The Toast was created with CG renderings & composite photography, and it is exhibited as framed prints.

1st Edition, 1/1

Private commission.

MEDIUM Pigment Photographic Prints

Credits

DIRECTOR OF R&D AND RENDERING: Michael Marcondes 3D MODELING: Benjamin Leitgeb TECHNICAL ADVISOR: Adam Burke CAMERA OPERATOR: John Dreyer LOCATION MANAGER: Sarah Tihany

design & production