Distillations

This work begins with my father distilling and running moonshine in his younger, less reputable days.  Distillations began as a response to this history as narrative but is more symbolic the significance of the process; “distillation” carries far more symbolic meaning than merely alcohol.  Distillation as a process is preservation, purification, transformation and transubstantiation.  The byproduct of these processes is a gestalt amalgam where the final product is metaphysically more important than the sugar, water and yeast that went into it. 

This work became an exercise in cramming as much “meaning” and using as many “triggers” as possible to clue in and direct the viewer.

Stereotypically shaped white glass moonshine jugs surround the three-gallon, polished copper “pot belly” still where I make my brew is located in the upper center of a mandorla shaped shrine.  Firstly, the jugs serve as urns, presumably containing previous distillates collected over time.  Personally they become ancestral remnants hold the “souls” of individuals where each jug is unique but through similarities of surface, material, color and even similarly shaped handles, they share an obvious propinquity—a common bloodline or at the very least a signature style of their creator.  The jugs protect and preserve their contents just as any reliquary does and in the process the contents are changed, their significance modified.  The transformation is important because it reinforces the importance of the alchemical processes that occur in the still.  The jugs can only house the pure, un-denatured alcohol produced by a careful cooking of the mash. 

The still serves as the giver of the sanctified boon at my shrine where the ritualized substance (moonshine) is bequeathed to those who kneel before it to collect the dripping liquor from the four-foot long condensing coil.  As the jugs can be seen as individual incarnations, the singular still is archetypal of the bootlegger.  When placed within the mandorla shape other connotations can be attached, specifically those of Christ or the Madonna.  Now the still becomes a conduit for transubstantiation—just as Christ turned bread into wine the still converts solid grain into alcohol.  Going further, then, to imbibe from the shrine is commensurate with taking communion, placing the viewer within my heirophany.

The mandorla acts as signifying intermediary between the divine world of perfect symmetry and the imperfect space we inhabit.  To enter that world requires an act of ritual; in the case of Disseminate Distillate that act is the prostrate kneeling before the shrine to partake of the moonshine.  Ritual imbibing is common to many mythologies as a means of communing with other realms; transmutation, then, is two-fold where the liquor is a transmuted substance but also has the power to change the drinker into someone different than he was before the ritual.

Layers upon layers, upon layers.