Human Endeavors No.1-5

*Contains Audio* *NSFW*

Included here are excerpts taken from a longer completion of individual video pieces from the Human Endeavor series, began in 2016. The first 5 installments of this series, sampled here — (Hunt), (Skin), (Chop), (Harm) & (Cry) — are part of a larger body of work dealing with notions of traditional masculinity and my own tenuous relationship with these norms as experienced through my own relative failure and success at being a “man”. Each act was chosen for its relationship to either a masculine trope — such as The Hunt as being a traditional rite of passage into manhood — or a deliberate demonstration in opposition to such traditions.

Strangely it is both the genuine failure from attempting “manly” activities, such as (Skin) and the interior, almost uncomfortable vulnerably in pieces such as (Cry), that begin to pull back at the larger, more perversive truth; That there is a great and profound strength in vulnerability. Perhaps not the ridged, malignantly stoic strength that traditional masculinity has come to embody and bestow on adolescent men, but it is a mighty thing nonetheless. Thus it is through these first five endeavors that I have learned that in order to undermine some of the more pervasive and toxic traits of masculinity, all I have to do is lay my self bare and reveal my own naiveté or show that I have the courage to be seen preforming an act that stands in contrast to them. Either way, the process of navigation seems to be all that is required to dissolve some fo the boundaries that separate what is means to be a man versus simply a human.