What I’m Afraid to Look At is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4^th 2009.

The 16^th century Baroque artist, Caravaggio, lived by the motto Nec spe, nec metu which translates, “Without hope or fear.”  Certainly, his contemporaries may have mistaken his bravado as indicative of some fearlessness, but on the other side of 5 centuries with the panoptic perspective that the corpus of his work provides, we can see it for what it truly was: a covering for the great fear that ate away at his soul. His life running and the pathos that he shared for the street urchin, sinner found in his paintings culminating in his final self-portrait “David with the Head of Goliath” help give us the reality and depth of this fear.

In the movie Donnie Darko, Donnie cries out “Why should we care about dead rabbits!” when discussing in his English class the book Watership Down. Why indeed; for rabbits have no fear of death; no fear at all, so their fate according to Donnie is inconsequential. The movie states that fear is an indigenous resident in our humanity, and unlike the animal kingdom, who engages their fear merely in the Darwinian concept of flight, our humanity comes face to face with fears so large, so powerful, so pervasive that they cannot be evaded; they swallow not only us but like a black hole everything that enters their orbit. Donnie realizes he must face them. Donnie Darko engages the reality of repressed fears and the many masks used to cover them up and flee from them. “Why do you wear that silly rabbit suit?” Donnie asks Frank the demonic looking 6 foot tall rabbit; to which Frank replies, “Why do you wear that silly man-suit?”

Masks, veneers, threadbare coverings—these are the first impressions when looking at Jessica Erickson’s exhibit: “What I’m Afraid to Look At”. Behind pie crusts, icing, diapers and wallpaper in idyllic settings in soothing pastels and muted colors we find hidden refugees, mutilated bodies, graveyards and viruses painted with coloring dyes. These are obscured enough to keep the focus not on the object of fear but on the covering each wears. Each is textured, rough and homespun—some created with homemade paper finely detailed and pressed with stampings, others from remnants as if found in some spare room craft drawer—all with the meticulous care of any creative and intent child. They are personal pieces, purposeful and constructed; such is the way we erect means to evade our fears; we use what is at hand, dress them up elaborately and hope they won’t peek through, but eventually they do regardless of how they are regaled. The contemplative observer should pause and note their own means of avoidance; they should ask, “How have I attempted such insulation?”

Erickson does not end her statement here; she calls her work momento mori, or “Remember you will die”, which historically are artistic works meant to help remind people of their own mortality. Her titles tell us that our mortality is at risk when we face displacement, disease, death or victimization. Thus, when confronted by these we seek the solace of our craftmaking psyches and the escape provided via them, but there is no escape. It lurks everywhere: in the innocence of childhood, behind the window looking in, in the fixtures we use to light our houses, behind the wallpaper and in the food we eat; our mortality is omnipresent, and the elaborate measures of our flight are—regardless of how clever—mere foppery. Consider the following poem:

Dear Atom Bomb,

I confess—you were my high school obsession.
You bloomed inside my chest until I howled. You shook me
with your booming zillion wattage. You were bigger
than rock and roll. I lost days to you, the way you expanded

to become more than even yourself. In Science-class
movies, you puffed men like microwaved marshmallows,
raked blood from their insides, and always I could feel
your heat like a massive cloak around my shoulders.

You embarrassed me. You were too depraved for dignity,
not caring whose eyes you melted, whose innards oozed;
you balled up control in your God-huge palms
and tossed it into the stratosphere. Oh, Atom Bomb,

I miss you. These days my mind is no incandescent
blur but a narrow infrared beam spotlighting
bounded fears: cancer in a single throat; a shock
of blood on the clean sheets; a careless turn from

the grocery store lot into the pickup with the pit bull
in the bed. Oh, Atom Bomb, come back. Take me away
from the twitch in my leg, the cracking lead paint,
the lurking salmonella. Sweep me up in your blinding

white certainty. Make me sure once again that
I’ll live till the world’s brilliant end.[1]

When one fear is gone another supplants it; we cannot shake them off. We can only come to terms with them. Erickson begs us to reconcile with our fears and our mortality.

In Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Tommy and Izzi quest to escape death through the Fountain of Life in one episode and in a more modern episode through science and medicine; these become their mechanisms for coping—their elaborate hoax for avoiding reality. It is in this single-minded pursuit that instead of prolonging life or overcoming their transience that the life they have is stripped of any value. Tommy away from his love invests his days isolated and alone unable to enjoy the very thing he wishes to save. The climax comes only when Tommy realizes the truth of the Grand Inquisitor, “Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement…All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul.” Only after this realization is he capable of fully living.

The awfulness of this may cause the dilemma that Ransom faced in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra:

My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful.[2]

Consider truth here instead of goodness; it is the category that Erickson deals in and which to us may look as dreadful as Ransom’s “good”. And just like Lewis she does not give us a trite answer; for to do so would appear as much a fraudulent escape as she has already urged us to question. She emphasizes, instead, the truth of mortality, the reality of fear and its inescapable quality. She shows us a lens where by children prompt the macabre, where we eat the dead and where we are stalked by disease; it is gruesome; it is certain! What she does in a very Schafferian manner is force us to face this dilemma in order to ask the question, “What now?” Bravado means nothing, escape is impossible, fear prevails. Donnie is right; only in fear is there consequence. For fear forces one to engage in questions that truly matter and look for answers in transcendent categories rather than in masks of our own making. What the artist has done, is present us with a means not to name our fears—or fight them or solve them—but to grow accustomed enough to them that we might discover what’s beyond them—as the artist writes: “a truth that is stark and rich, bitter and sweet.” She asks us to remove our silly rabbit suits, to hold the mask like David presenting Goliath’s head and to discard all ten feet of its bluster.

[1] Pierce, Catherine. “Dear Atom Bomb.” Indiana Review 2nd ser. 30 (2009): 78. Print.

[2] Lewis, C. S. Perelandra a novel. New York: Scribner Classics, 1996.17. Print.