Certain events are powerful enough to change reality in an instant. When they happen, visualizing the world requires alternate lenses to adapt progressively. In searching the DIN Archives, we find ourselves amid one such event in the form of a Category 5 COVID-19 global pandemic. For this rewind, a meaningful piece from the past is challenging to our perception according to present reality.
Today, we delve back to May of 2010 to welcome back a piece by Chris Bardey. To us, his Matrix Feels Alive reveals and suggests a teeming environment just beneath the skin. For 2020, we have all become hyper-conscious of how alive the organic matrix is within us all. Seemingly surrounded, COVID-19 has altered the visible and invisible as we cohabitate with an intense internal and external ecosystem.
Upon witnessing Bardey’s Matrix Feels Alive, we felt our perception jump into the present as if his art foreshadowed the plethora of virus images that would spread across the media. Bardey’s blotchy pink background illustrates impressions of a corporeal epidermis. Within its darkening, serpentine, and biologic spread, an observer might begin to interpret the swift, branching lines as muscle sinew below. We are more informed medically than ever and picturing our bodies brings a new awareness how this image works on the imagination.
As we move forward striving for normality, we face Bardey’s work as cautionary image of one life emerging within another. The body we trust to hold our consciousness is suddenly indefensible and we must call upon our decision making to defend our body in ways it never had to before. Yes, Bardey’s images are in the eye-of-the beholder, but our eyes see the overwhelming susceptibly to becoming a host matrix of propagation. With Matrix Feels Alive recurring in our mind, we have the choice to keep our bodies safe only by intention.
By Pedro Palacios
- Art and Media Editor
Pedro Palacios was born and raised in southern New Mexico. This is his graduating semester with New Mexico State University English Department.
MATRIX FEELS ALIVE is the creation of Chris Bardey
(Published in DIN 2010 Issue #1)
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