This is Where the Young Man Fell (2023)
A narrative of ambition, freedom, and the inevitable tension between inheritance and individuality, between darkness and illumination.
Icarus yearned for a world beyond the shadows—a place illuminated by the sun, where his dreams could thrive. This desire to escape the subterranean world of his father’s making, a place of solitude and suppressed pasts, drove him to seek his own path. His flight was not simply an act of rebellion but a pilgrimage toward self-discovery, an attempt to create a world he could call his own.
The wings Daedalus crafted for his son symbolized the intersection of wisdom, craftsmanship, and artistry—a fusion of knowledge passed down and freedom of thought. Yet, Icarus’s impatience, ambition, and striving carried him beyond the boundaries of what his father had envisioned. His ascent toward the heavens, although exhilarating and liberating, was short lived.
The story of Icarus is often told as a cautionary tale of hubris, but here it is reimagined as a metaphor for the human condition. His fall into the dark depths mirrors our journey into the recesses of memory and the unconscious. The myth is not one of death but of transformation—a descent into the unknown to retrieve fragments of the past and reemerge into the light.
Through this series, I examine the myth as a latent image—an unseen imprint waiting to be brought into clarity. It is not the brightness of light that reveals meaning but the plunge into darkness, where memory and imagination converge to shed new light on old truths. The flight of Icarus becomes a universal story of seeking, falling, and returning, offering a timeless reflection on the fragile balance between freedom and restraint, ambition and humility, the father and the son.
This work is a meditation on the power of myth, its ability to illuminate our own struggles and aspirations, and its place as a bridge between the past and the present. It is through these myths—processed, reimagined, and illuminated—that we find a way to confront our own darkness and recover what has been lost.