Artist Statement

Half of us tried to move on, the rest wanted to run it back.  This time between two Trump presidencies reminds me of the time between the twin towers falling.  After the first one went down, no one went home.  Did we know it wasn’t over?  It was 30 minutes of confusion, false hope, and impending doom.  

I am an animator suspicious of animation.  The 12 Principles are a set of aesthetic priorities designed to incite mass appeal in the hearts of American children.  That we teach these perverse constraints as universal principles has foreclosed our imaginations to what animation could be.  I am trying to claw back some of that possibility, one reluctant frame at a time.

We seem to be in a crisis of masculinity.  Feminism diagnosed our collective gender sickness, and is now blamed for causing it.  Cis-het masculinity had been “normal” and “ideal” for so long, these bros are freaking out to learn they are just another intersectional stack of experience.  We may have failed to express how unique and empowering this kind of specificity can be for all of us.  I still hope these are the dying gasps of patriarchy, but I find myself sitting at my desk waiting for another tower to fall.

I am a settler in my hometown.  I was born there, but the land isn’t mine.  This continent was dinosaur-country for millions of years, but people claim it now.  “My land,” they say, “my water.”  I don’t feel at home anywhere.  I’m just another American with a lost caucasian past, partially unraveled via 23 & Me to be implicated as an inheritor of my country’s twin sins.

I am no one’s person, no one’s partner.  An unmanned man, I slid off the poles of the gender sphere into some queered quadrant of liminal masculinity.  But I’m not from here.  Can I settle?  Will I stay?  

We are in the eye of a generational storm, a civilizational contest over reality itself.  We now have two, concurrent, distinct, national realities.  Each with their own sets of facts and data, cultures and signals, fashions and symbols.  We are Ameristan, factional, tribal, brutal and brutalizing.  It is hard to imagine a peaceful reconciliation.

People come to this country from everywhere and make so much of their lives.  Not me.  I’m from here and I feel paralyzed, still waiting for my life to begin, for my turn, to find my voice, to meet my future unknown, or for the cancer to come back.  Maybe waiting for the boomers to die off, so that their long shadow can finally dissipate.  

The animated loop may be the perfect form for this time.  A moving stasis, a balance between constant change and the eternal present.  A way of harnessing linearity, utilizing and obliterating it.  A seamless loop creates infinity.  Beginning, middle and end fold in on themselves and are multiplied.

Remission remains a fiction.  A convincing story we tell ourselves to bring hope and move on.  Cancer eventually comes back.  The trick is dying of something else first, or surviving the return.  In the meantime, they test my blood every three months, scan me yearly, and I wait.

Darren Douglas Floyd
October 2024