Exhausted, but content. Who can possibly ask for more?
Well, I might as well.
Every morning I wake up bound by an unrelenting exhaustion that I consistently fail to escape. My muscles ache as though I had never properly stretched them before, and my consciousness behaves as though it hasn't come to terms with the quick, fluid motion and impressive effort necessary to cross the room and silence the alarm clock. Moments after having performed this action, I'm pulling the covers back over my face and I drift into discomfort as distant voices whisper in my ear. I hear the sounds, but not the words. They mean nothing to me. My horrendous slumber lingers as I lie awake in bed, and lies in essence as the dark rings curled up beneath my eyes that stay with me throughout the day.
I haven't been sleeping well.
What I remember of my dreams tends to leave a bitter taste in my mind each morning as I dredge up the superhuman strength required to lift my concrete eyelids and admit entry to the blurry rays of curtain-filtered sunlight. Sometimes the details escape me. Sometimes they don't. Always, ALWAYS they are fraught with a fierce anxiety, like a many-headed serpent, that snaps and clutches at me at every twist and glance. No matter the circumstance, or try as I might to evade the beast's jaws, I am always finding myself practically thrown into the wyrm's mouth by own best intentions.
What I ask is for is a peaceful sleep. A sleep without worries and that anxiety which I have finally managed to successfully evade during the day, now intent on living on through some sick subconscious fear in my mind while I am resting and have no means with which to beat it. There's no use in coaching yourself to breathe deeply and count backwards in a dream.
Most curious is perhaps the fact that it is only the memory of a panic attack, or the memory of the anxiety and physical symptoms that occur during my sleep. Panic and worry are not necessarily physical, substantial things as much as a state of mind that can affect an individual's mind and body. Would that make my dream panic just as real in the sense of how it affects my body and mind as my ordinary conscious anxiety?
Something to ponder, I guess.
***
This artwork is part of my Nintendo64 era inspired collage artwork series, and depicts Majora's Mask as those geeks out there should already know without me telling them. Before I get into the media and discussing the project as a work of art and the physical creation process involved with it, I wanted to say a little more about the subject matter.
I'm at that awkward age where people were playing Super Nintedo Entertainment Systems and Sega who knows what when I was born, but had already upgraded to better consoles by the time I was actually old enough to hold a controller. I started playing the N64 when I was little more than a toddler, and never looked back. It was then written in the book of geek that I would forever onward be a nerd, which I completely took in stride, without even knowing I was doing so. It wasn't about labels or stereotypes or living up to some misogynistic "gamer girl" ideal. I fell in love with gaming. It was what I liked to do.
The Legend of Zelda games were actually something I sort of fell into later on in my life, a much more recent acquisition to my gaming experiences. I rented Ocarina of Time from a Hollywood video store once when I was still in elementary school and was clueless as to how to play it. Whether I could read and simply chose not to, or whether I found the paragraphs of plot presented to the player at the opening of the game mind-numbing as a 6 year old, I don't know. What I do know is that I had no idea what I was supposed to do and ran around kokiri village like an idiot for more than an hour every day for a week until the game rental was up. I never found the kokiri sword or equipped the shield. I never tried to lift rocks or discovered the rupees hiding in the tall grass. I didn't even realize you could save the game by pausing. In fact, I didn't even know there were subscreens when you paused the game, and somehow I forget whether I even knew to press the up c button when navi tried desperately to get my attention. Did I even know where the up c button was located on the 64 controller? I hope with all that's right in this world the answer to that was yes.
As it turns out, Ocarina of Time would become that one game I would always regret not playing. It was that game that other gamers would ask about and would then commence to verbally abuse me for having conjolingly skipped, and likewise the entire Legend of Zelda franchise.
So why Majora's Mask...?
It honestly just seemed like a good place to start.
I wanted to make an artwork inspired by the Legend of Zelda franchise, and the thought came to me to do the mask, as it was a simple, substantial object that could be effectively captured with this particular collage technique. I'd really like to move on to doing other collage artworks inspired by video games, and work my way into designing much more complex collages with much more intricate details.
One of my followers on Twitter suggested doing more masks, and highly recommended the mask of truth. All I can say is that it is extremely likely I'll be tackling said mask in the very near future, as the idea of making more mask collages is one that I absolutely adored.
This image is entirely compromised of National Geographic magazine scraps that have been carefully arranged and secured to a large canvas.
I hope you all have had a fabulous summer, and are sleeping much better than I have been as of late!
Sincerely, Krystal Dawn
Facebook: Krystal Dawn
Twitter: KrystalDawnArt
DeviantART: kekei94
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