Jaya Merina Patel

Nothing is extraordinary until you remember that it is, and take it in wide-eyed and shocked like a baby again. Wretched, salty burning in your throat, laughing and miserable and alive.

In a world where generative AI kills art and calls it progress, where people suffer and die while empathy is frivolous, nothing is more important than remembering what it means to be human. Slow, flawed, and tender.

Joy can’t be found in a life of dull convenience– I want to find it in all the little places we learn to ignore for normalcy’s sake. In dirt, in our blood, in the soft white underbelly. In the delicious discomfort of myself and everyone else.

We shape our world through what we see, and in return it shapes us. This is what art is really about. Grasping at showing each other a given moment, as it is and as we are, right then.

Humanity makes art to say, “look mom, see?”