Aquarium came from a desire to explore ideas relating to self, symbolism, and society using illustrated analogy and suggestive representation. The work is allegorical, inspired by concepts pertaining to the human condition, a segregating yet universal experience. Its manifestation is not unlike an editorial cartoon generating discourse prompted by the political climate, extreme events, and current circumstances, nor is it as trivial as a quick skit. Instead, the creative process became likened to daily journaling or mark-making. After all, fundamental language elements, including all mental products and cultural treatments, are represented as signs, symbols, and other such semantics. Through these contextual clues, the visual metaphor of an aquarium implies the macro, the world at large, while similarly, the micro, a self-portrait of time spent daily during Enhanced Community Quarantine. These kinds of binary oppositions became central motifs, more specifically: isolation and community (through the ecology of the subject), inside and outside (from the perspective and relationship of author and audience), and truth or tale (in its generalization and subsequent abstraction). Inevitably, drawing without syntax would naturally generate meaning as meaning is the offspring of relationships between signs, perhaps, postulating that a work of art is a work of nature.

WRITTEN By Katarina Ortiz