Dispositional Granularity
by uhma janus
“… I do not need precision to know myself, or you. I need room for all of our selves to hold counsel. I ‘am’ complex. I am a dream. I am an ecology of selves.”
Nora Bateson
“My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots – an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life”
Yayoi Kusama
Dispositional Granularity is a series of ten acrylic ink paintings made in 2021-2022. This series delves into the meaning of identity. Anchored in Bateson’s description of what the state of being means, as the dynamic multiplicity of selves that make up a human being, this series explores some of those embodied states. Each state is depicted as the result of a myriad of concatenated events, as if pulsating electric currents traveling through a nervous system of a human being so as to elicit a certain state. Each state gets to be deconstructed into its infinite-like vastness of atomic components and its connecting forces, structuring it so.
Dispositional Granularity depicts a specific journey from the very primitive, vestigial, amygdala-driven, ignorant states, to an ultimate connected, realized state.
The journey begins with the state of automatic, dark reactivity depicted in both evLΩ and evLα. Distributively dissipating and Crowned absence reflect on the perils of remaining in such former state, as with the wasted energy that occurs and the unproductive superficial enactment of being, as merely presenting pretension.
Inwardly threading/Knotted embolism depicts the human being kept as captive, unable to advance, stuck in obfuscated repetitive cycles that can’t yield or lead to progress. While remaining captive, even if unknown to the consciousness of the being, a fight between light and darkness ensues within, as Reflective/Harmonizing resonance shows.
Recognizing the wall that the human being in such predicament is facing, if there is a strong will to progress, the only possibility to move forward requires the eclipsing process of Impossibility to continue: Gestation in which a destruction of all that’s known is to occur and one is completely emptied out, taken by the hollowing force of Hollowed/Vaccuming.
The result is the emergence and flourishment of fresh threads that get to be the base for a next, more integrated self in Multiangulated: a connected composite that may finally yield a robust, vibrant, wholesome, ultimately-grounded, and expansively-open state of Rooted.
In light of contemporary society’s appeal to expediency and transiency, even when this is applied to their own lives, as human beings, Dispositional Granularity is an invitation to understand ourselves as a fluctuation of intermittently-inhabited states, as in an unfolding process within time, and to honor the existence of each of the states as necessary within the continuum of the threaded life.
Uhma Janus was born and raised in León, Guanajuato, México. In 2005, she completed her coursework for a Bachelor in Science in Physics by the University of Guanajuato, with special interest in theoretical Particle Physics. In 2013 she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Louisville.
Janus has been included in the exhibitions “Our Kentucky Home: Hispanic/Latin American Visual Art in the Commonwealth. Traveling exhibit” at various locations in the state of Kentucky and “Open Studio Louisville Juried Exhibition” at Cressman Center for Visual Arts, Louisville, KY. Janus currently lives and works in Louisville, KY.