“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Such a deceptively simple phrase, one I was trying to explain to my daughter the other day. She was literally judging a book by its cover, but the concept of seeing past the layers of ego and identity we project to the world and onto others is getting increasingly messier and hard to do.
With the invention of the internet, we created a whole digital platform to elevate the person we wish we were, a place to hide the person we really are and the life we actually live. How many human beings hide from their physical reality behind edited photo walls and 60-second clips and calculated captions? 5.07 billion of us have a social media presence at last count. Curated however badly, what we share is a surface-level view of ourselves.
When I look at the collage work that ALEX ECKMAN-LAWN creates, I feel like he’s cracking through the surface images and exposing the delicate and sensitive depths below. Under the picturesque pastoral scene lies a corpse, beneath the beautiful, marble face lies a mess of blood and meat and teeth, under a captivating floral display lurks a skull. The depth and movement in all of his pieces makes me feel like I’m seeing the aftermath of a psychological earthquake. The façade has shattered and the abyss has opened up to expose the core.
The membrane between the waking world and this nightmare life is stretched so thin you can see right through to the other side.
- Alex Eckman-Lawn
