Hello there! It's Jocelyn Mathewes from my studio in Appalachia.
And today, I'm going to talk about a single, very personal work made during recovery from my hospitalizations. I’ve hesitated to share much about it, because, well, it’s deeply personal.
In 2019, several extended hospital stays created within me a fear of my own body. So much attention needed to be paid to my body’s basic functions and needs (temperature, water, blood, skin, heartbeat), it became the main obsession of my mind. I feared sleep, because my mind could not rest from monitoring my body, which was not rested or at ease in the first place.
But even my mind wasn’t safe or to be trusted—so many medications coursing through me were amplifying my predisposition to anxiety.
I never before felt compelled to make my own body so explicitly the subject of my art. While many artists use self-portraits as a medium (often because we are the most available subject matter or model), I shied away from it. Not this time.
I photographed my own fearful face, and named the piece after the medication that put me in that horrible mental state. Decadron.
let's talk hyper-vigilance
Anxiety is a normal human feeling. But hyper-vigilance comes from experiences that teach our bodies and minds to be in a heightened state more frequently than usual. It can rewire our brains so we get stuck in that mode, too.
I got stuck in that mode in the hospital, and I needed to create this picture to understand the self that it created. But that single, static image didn’t feel quite right.
So I kept experimenting.
What I felt the original image failed to express what the visceral sensation of itching all over your skin, as though everything in your body was responding all at once. Exploding, crawling, moving without moving. I tried to convey this by animating the eyes attached to my face—
—but it felt a little comedic, almost puppet-like. At the same time, it’s unnerving and sort of ugly, in a way. "Is that chicken pox?” my youngest asked me when she first saw the image.
I wanted to create a sense of the strange through the medium it was printed on, so I had a few test prints on metal made. The image rendered well, and I was happy with the substrate. I tucked it in to my solo show, Within Normal Limits, in February, but it definitely stood apart from my other works.
Its size made you look deeply inside it and examine the details, but it felt too small for the feeling. So I took Decadron and kept experimenting with it.
resolving the unresolved
Anxiety is by nature unresolved. It thrives on the unknown and the uncertain. Just as my feelings about the experience remains unresolved, the work itself remains unresolved.
Only when I printed it large did it feel like it achieved something of what I intended—
This image is unsettling. The size makes it more so. People I have shared it with do not “like” it. It is hard for my husband—who sat with me on those horrible nights—to look at. It is hard for me to look at.
And I’m not sure it achieves what I want, because even at a larger size it still feels part comedic, part serious. It can’t decide what it is.
So still, the work feels unfinished.
new contexts
Decadron is definitely influenced by the science fiction television and fantasy novels I was reading during my recovery—any world to escape to beyond the challenges of my body. What better way to funnel my strange undecided feelings about anxiety than channel it through something I’m equally undecided about—AI image generation technology.
At first, my initial prompt was rejected from community standards.
Apparently the illustration of the sensations and feelings I was trying to evoke in were too hot to handle.
Once I found a way to phrase things to avoid being blocked in my explorations, I felt Midjourney’s capacity for variation to be overwhelming — the sheer abundance of imagery was an infinity mirror of mixed emotions. It offered up subtle variations in expression—morose, pseudo-hopeful, tired, fearful—that all captured the mingled components of my past experience.
Exploring this way gave me a distance from the specificity of seeing my self in an image. There was also something comforting (and false) in thinking about how the algorithm looked back through all the probabilities of language and through vast amounts of past “data” on the meanings of the words and perhaps pull from something that referenced similar experiences to mine.
Of course. Midjourney doesn’t “understand,” my experience. It’s more like the fun-house mirror of the internet.
final (unresolved) thoughts
Decadron still doesn’t feel finished to me, just as my thoughts about artificial intelligence are conflicted. In both cases, I face an unknown and feel the uncertainty. I have no answers.
But in the face of anxiety, we (you and I) will find a way through.
xo,
jocelyn
P.S. If you’ve got this far, thank you for being a paid subscriber. I’m so grateful for each and every one of you.
xo,
jocelyn
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I know this hyper vigilant body focused anxiety. For me it was the worst during pregnancy. I learned I was chronically ill at the end of the second trimester and was suddenly so hyper aware of my physical body. Definitely seeing that experience reflected here. 👀👀👀
I also like how you equate AI to a funhouse mirror. That feels accurate.