Phantasos

Phantasos

Phantasos — my only bronze creation — is an experimental, chimeric being, both in terms of its physical appearance and the ideas guiding its creation.

I wanted to make a humanoid figure that combined two different visual languages. I chose Greco-Roman architecture as one, and the art of H.R. Giger for the other. Giger created his biomechanical humanoids, and I would use a similar prompt to make an architectural hybrid.

As I developed the form, I became interested in ideas around blindness — both physical and metaphorical.

The image of a confident and powerful being moving forward even with physically-impaired sight fascinated me endlessly, but I didn’t know why.

I began thinking about sight vs. blindness, intuition vs. analysis, “trusting your gut” vs. “seeing the light”, “putting on blinders” vs. “shutting out the noise”.

I asked myself how we move with internal strength, purpose, and clarity even in the face of uncertainty — of metaphorical darkness. I wondered if that would be arrogance or confidence.

These ideas and questions guided me to the title Phantasos, a kind of god of prophetic dreams.

I may have made this sculpture in my last semester of college — a time characterized by an impending transition to an unknown and unsure future — but I find myself pondering the same thoughts, asking the same questions, today as when I first designed Phantasos.