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Jack Bordnick's sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones — aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves. I am an Industrial design graduate of Pratt Institute in New York.
Hill Giant
Richard Weems
His yawn disconcerts the morning hush, starting with the pebbles underfoot. He dashes a sheep, then two, for breakfast. Villagers, as per their proper function, run in fright. What choice have they?: their heads come not even to his knee.
He paws through guts and bones and fleece for morsels; lick smacks echo. He slings a mostly whole carcass over a shoulder (no mind paid to the offal dripping into his back hair), and it’s back to the cave with him.
His mate grunts, growls, threatens, and he plops her breakfast like wet moss before her. He cowers back to the opening of the cave, peeks up at the sun. So bright. He calls back the stars, but they don’t heed. He dares enter the cave again only when she has a mouthful of food. She slurps and gulps, she holds her stomach a moment, she growls and has at the sheep again.
A fight. The villagers have gathered tools, fire and angry words. They find him picking at an apple tree, running branches clean between his teeth.
No one understands each other: he hates to fight when full of fruit; they are keen on fire and think everything but them fears it. Villagers fly and land in lethal positions, but not before they scrape their rakes across his shins. Torches singe his leg hair, heat his testicles. He pinches one villager’s head until it pops, backhands three from whence they came.
He hates most stepping on the bodies—such unsure footing. Like walking on dunghills. He slips and catches himself up with one hand, and the puny villagers prick at his wrist with their hoes, make boo-boos with their scythes. Another team has at his ankles with hammers and sticks. Is that one trying to bite him?
Villagers flattened, villagers broken, villagers pureed. As they retreat, he gnashes one between his teeth and sprays bloody spittle and flesh and crushed bone at them. The wounded squirm and scream and cry as he picks them up and drops them, higher and higher, until they’ve stopped moving. The one that’s lasted the highest, that one he holds aloft and offers it to the darkening sky. Broken limbs dangle in his grip. A light moan now and then: feeble, hopeless. The sky does not accept.
He keeps the rejected offering in his pouch to munch on later.
He follows the villagers’ tracks for a bit to make sure their retreat is complete. Their numbers have diminished greatly, but always there seems to be another swarm out there ready to prick at him at his slightest transgression into lands they fail to mark but still consider their own. They spawn like mosquitoes, like cattle; they dig lines in the earth so that plants and meat grow in unnatural patterns. He will crush one of their huts tomorrow, make their women scream and pop some of those little, helpless spawn between his fingers. He will scatter their cultivated grain.
He makes off with two choice victims: plump, bloody and still mostly whole (she likes the bloody ones). His mate snatches them, growls him from the cave and bites through the bones of her evening meal. She looks at him with hatred, with instinctual rage, this child whose kicks literally jolt her and throw her about the source of all her distress yet the last thing she’d take it out on.
His mate will kill him before he ever gets to know that child in her belly—this knowledge burns him in his very genes. She will crack his head open. Bite his face and tear off flesh from his cheek to the nape of his neck. The child’s first feast will be on his thigh.
Below, he sees the villagers’ squares. Their fields. Their huts gathered in ordered arrays of light. The fires they covet and hold in such high esteem.
He sees stars. He sits and points his face toward them. How can no one else be crying to the sky on a night like this? When he howls, when he sings his poetry, he can’t hear another soul joining him.
