Just a Suit
by Raymond Gaston
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Just a Suit, 2016
Artist’s Statement
I am interested in schema, that script we all carry around in our heads telling us what to do and how to react to repeated cultural happenings. And because I am interested in this, I am also interested in, well, not this. What I want to do, then, is to challenge that schema in a way that creates an entirely foreign experience. Endlessly, I am intrigued by the idea that we do things without fully meaning to do them. That our actions are not thought out in such a manner that we live fully conscious of each moment, but rather that we react and then later reflect. The idea that our reactions to things are based in shared experience rooted in culture is at the core of my work. That we respond to things based on a script in our head, not our experience at that moment. Because of this, I want to challenge myself to find these reactions and create a response in myself that is contrary to how I would automatically react. Each piece that I make is for a specific question and place. And each piece deals with my questions of schema, of what my reaction is supposed to be. And if my reaction then is something not unique to my own feelings, I want my art to question that, to push back and have an individual reaction.
Just a Suit is a piece that I created in response to and in combination with my novel, The Way Your Father Dies. It is a reflection on the idea, both literally and metaphorically, of being in someone else’s story, and yet, how that is also an impossible action.
Raymond Gaston received his MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, where he was the launching editor in chief of Lunch Ticket, a literary journal published by the Antioch MFA community. He recently spoke and read at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, and was invited to the Institute des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, part of the Paris Biennale. His fiction has appeared in The Commonline Journal, Five2One Magazine, and the Evening Street Press. His artwork has been shown at the Brand Museum, the Santa Monica Gallery, and in private collections around the world.