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Untitled (A Pathetic Attempt at the Forceful Removal of Hysterical Symptoms)
Repressed memories gnaw at the bars of their psychical enclosures; twitches carry the scars of a twisted past, hypercathected forbidden sexuality exploding in orgasmic disguise. Release, repression, repetitive reliving, and punishment united at the surface of my body as I smashed into an impenetrable barrier of an otherwise fragile construct.
I ask you to find it in your heart to notice me. To ridicule me, to laugh at me. I ask you to find it in your heart to call me worthless. To see the moments when I ricochet off the wall and slam my head against the floor as exactly what I deserve after such a pathetic attempt at relief. I ask you to find it in your heart to touch yourself. To rub and tug and slide inside of this self-contained moment because only in watching your eyes roll in the back of your head will I ever be able to chug my second bottle of wine and scream “I’M A FUCKING FIRECRACKER.”
Evan Karas is a senior at Gallatin studying how to re-welcome neglected parts of the human experience through art and hospitality spaces. Karas’s crippling victim complex flourished in fifth grade following subjectively aggrandized experiences with abuse culminating in an abandonment of all creative pursuits, excluding his role as eccentric ballet instructor Boris Kolenkhov in the 2015 Chicago City Day School production of You Can’t Take it With You. Blending video art, performance, and installation, Karas weaves together catharsis, confession, confusion, and comedy into absurdist, uncomfortable assemblages that wrestle with the mind’s darkest corners, straddling the innocent and impish, aspirational and apocalyptic, childish and chthonic, nostalgic and nonsensical.
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