I’d like to thank Mikael B. for his emotively fluorescent, contemporary ethos and permission for inclusion in this month’s featured artist series. He achieves what all contemporary art attempts (and most fails to do)—to be both present and ahead of its time. Your prolificacy is very much appreciated, my friend. To learn more about Mikael check out his biography below and visit his links.
I’d like to thank you personally for reading and being a part of this experience. Without you, it would be an empty pursuit. I hope you are enjoying the content and, if you ever feel so inclined, feel free to send me a message to continue this conversation. If you have any suggestions or comments, perhaps even artists you’d like to share, please do, I’m always open to hosting new ideas. I’d look forward to it…
WRITING
**Novel Excerpt**
I climbed from the sunken blue fortress of my former self and made my way up the rocks reaching for an imagination. Reaching for naturalized life. Reaching for a voice… a persistent voice that kept me pushing. Kept my feet shuffling.
I could have been walking for days, months, following that echo—beyond the forest of my rebirth, into those lush purple mountains, stained in red like old abstract brushstrokes. I kept moving, and more diligently, thinking. I thought about home and friends, things that are now long gone. And though they should be painful recollections, it was all very dull and vapid. Lifeless. Designated stationary reflections of some displaced nostalgia, or past life. Home was now just television—a makeshift idea, and no longer a feeling. Perhaps it had always been just that, an idea. Not a destination or place to return to, but a delusion of shared energy between other lost souls in circumferential alignment. But even in this displacement and disorientation in thought, in my vague recollections of what it felt like to be human, it was this distant idea of home that kept me pushing ahead. Though I couldn’t feel it, I still sought after it. Or maybe it was just survival that burned my momentum.
Maybe life hadn’t been so bad in the old world after all. There were moments between all the pernicious little lies and endless mounds of shit served up by the impressionable everybody and everything, and their chief manipulators that held the majority helm at the peak of castration, slowing sinking the species into a decadent overdrive. And though I knew that way of life would never last, it was surely better than this… everything and everyone I’d ever known and loved, gone. And here I am, alive and unwell, alone in the wilderness, chasing an apparition.
I had become docile in my traipse. Faintly subservient, climbing stone after stone up this behemoth rock, burning battery acid from my thighs, carving hieroglyphs on my way to god knows where in what felt like infinities within a data labyrinth. My attempts to reminisce about the big things and small began to jumble together the further I trekked up the mountain. I was no longer experiencing a broken nostalgia—it was now just blatant confusion. It had become difficult to place timelines, both before and after my awakening. It felt as if centuries had passed in fractions of a minute, and that obnoxious cackling, now even further in the distance, made it that much more impossible to concentrate. Maybe I had been underwater too long in a dream state, and maybe this was all part of it… submerged past the breaking point and waking into an otherworldly periphery. Maybe I’d been exposed to some sort of data loss agent or virus, long enough to change me indefinitely, and growing stronger as I grow weak, twisting my exiled roots. Maybe I was dead.
Where is that damn ape? That muffled voice that seethes and glitches and hurls both senseful and insane epithets at me, only through inflections of emotion? Where is my starved sun, that porcelain brain that rose like a hot-air balloon at the waterfall of my rebirth?— And when we fell, we fell together, gallantly sinking in the place where things get cleansed like trillions of separated water molecules serving as their own proud creator to the astronomical whole.
I made it to the top of the mountain. The air was thin and clean. The sky stretched on like a thousand sustained singers in climax, and all I could see were rows and rows of more mountains, bleeding along the horizon. The wind was gentle and the land was still. There were no signs of life. No birds in the sky, no mammals or rodents brushing in the distance. No noticeable sounds, and that voice was gone. I was alone, naked, damp with sweat, spit from the earth like an orphan, once filled with hope, but now abandoned once again. I began to cry, long uncontrollable sobs sucking in my cheeks. A prideful sheath of animated fragments resurrected between universal declaration and conceited prayer. The scattering echoes of my howl and flood splashed against the earth with thundering blare like a restless crowd with stone ears. My thoughts and tears were blending together, paving the road to enlightened belief. Paving the road to my freedom.
I couldn’t pretend this was real—compute—r, me—these thoughts, re—boot—this setting, real—his nakedness—me…. I need what I need to survive, to experience all this whole… to love. I sat in a pool of my tears and spread my body along the cool stones until I was fully stretched against the earth. I began to reflect upon my most recent of journeys. My most intimate of tyrants—
Where has he gone? He or it or they doesn’t seemingly ponder the literacy of living, dragging its torpid half-self along the naked fringe of the mind, characterizing unnecessary assessments of how one could better understand the meaning of journey. It was meant to be us, within the human odyssey, that required further endowment to obtain a greater understanding of life to fulfill a greater purpose… the wry electric sharpener wheeled in an utterly infectious, slog-breathed savage, intentionally misinterpreting and misdirecting the everyday rampant desire of the lost soul, granting it purpose while forcing it to suffer through social anxiety and irregular heart palpitations, petting the ovaries as it releases its disengaged effluvium…
The trouble of finding him, and equally not so, was a draw of personal salvation. And any thought of letting him go, in all probability, would have been the smartest thing to do, but it wasn’t the road that had been chosen.
by LORIN DREXLER
Normal Matter
I haven’t decided yet
if I am made up of stardust—
the extrasensory perception
of dark matter meeting dark energy—
or that which comes
stumbling out
like an astronaut attached
to a spacecraft.
I hold my gray bleeding heart in my
palm like a shaman waving his staff to the gods
in an inanimate dream had
by things that don’t normally do so.
As I raise this charcoaling
drum to the universe and squeeze
it like a bottled rainbow,
the sky explodes
in both pixels and
linguistics. the grid forces
itself through and the
remaining thoughts of
the universe cancel themselves
out.
I am a simple being
filled with all kinds of
explanations and colors
and clocks that release strange
effluviums,
then rerelease something
spectacular yet
justifiably calm in the
head of the omnipotent
center which surrounds
everything in sovereign rule.
creativity is sheer will,
and lots of planning and
studying and folding and…
unfolding a tired clock
that holds one hand behind
its back, and the other, blindly,
like a child trying impatiently
to remember anything
about yesterday
besides simple colors
and letters and terribly
untheoretical drawings
about the mundane present
and most significant past.
the starlet raises her glass,
you know—the seeing one,
and denounces this make-believe world
I live in.
I sing loudly so only the stars
will shine through the floating
buoy in the sky that is me—
I am captured.
And released.
I am just trying to recollect,
anything.
by LORIN DREXLER
About the Artist
Mikael B. (via www.mikael-b.com)
Born in Denmark, Mikael B. emigrated to the United States to continue building his career in both the fine art world and urban contemporary genre. Influenced in his early years as a graffiti artist, Mikael B. has developed a signature aesthetic and artistic identity that combines complex graphic elements of wildstyle graffiti with bold colors and graphic shapes. His expressive pieces have a volcanic energy, uncompromising attitude, and inherent candidness that create a colorful universe where everything is possible. Mikael B. has shown internationally and locally, working with clients that include Google, Nike, American Express, LinkedIn, Heineken, Superfine! Art Fair and more. He has been featured in the LA Times, JUXTAPOZ, LA Weekly, Hi-Fructose, Graffiti Art Magazine, LA Canvas, and Artsy.
What is Gen Society?
Gen Society is an art space blog for visual art and creative writing collaborations, and other randomizations. Hosted by writer and musician, Lorin Drexler, this online venue is an expressive experience for those interested in the world of the arts. It is a literary journey through the hearts and minds of contemporary artists in practice and a reflection of those that have long passed.
If you’re an artist and would like to submit your work in consideration to collaborate with Gen Society, please click below:
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