Los Angeles based artist Desire Obtain Cherish brings a new awareness to one’s sense of self and happiness in his exhibition Servant To Infinite Distraction.
Each of the pieces being displayed explores the presence of natural happiness being clouded by the symbolic things people do to try to attain an artificial happiness.
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In an exclusive interview with the Parsons graduate, Jonathan Paul (Desire Obtain Cherish) explains his inspiration for his pieces. He says that his art shows people in the midst of their pursuit for happiness. When explaining one of his pieces called “I Forgot What I Liked Yesterday” he says, “We are bombarded constantly with things, with images and art ,with music and fashion. We have this and we’re painting over it. You’re going to come back tomorrow, and it’s going to look like something different.”
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Desire Obtain Cherish is addressing our chase to “figure ourselves out” in three different ways. Each way is characterized by either slabs of multi-colored paint, thousands of pills, or a material that looks almost like a thick, bubbly slime. When describing two different sculptures of children with the slime coming out of them he explains, “I use children because children have grown up with social media… We get to see the distraction where it’s coming out of its hand and coming out of its head. They’re getting consumed by this and they’re oblivious to this, just like we have become oblivious to this.”
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The slime covering the statues of the children makes a reappearance in the corners of the rooms where the exhibit is being held- a subtle statement about to those who notice it about the epidemic of “things” surrounding us. Desire Obtain Cherish is taking the filter that we have been building up since we were born, and showing viewers that we ourselves are enough.
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“I always know where I’m starting from, it’s this idea that we keep looking for happiness somewhere, and we were already born happy. We spend our entire lives trying to figure out what’s wrong, and nothing’s wrong.”
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Servant to Infinite Distraction is an invitation for people to see where genuine happiness truly lies. Perhaps it would be a good idea for us to take a moment out of our busy lives to accept this invitation, rip off the filter, and breathe.
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The exhibition is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m, and will run until June 18, 2016
