004 The Duality of Anxiety by Phillip McConnell

004 The Duality of Anxiety, 2021, 20″ x 20″ inches, Media: Glycce, Digital

“The Duality of Anxiety is centered around mental health and my own personal understanding of my mental health. In the black community mental health is not a topic that is often discussed to the caliber that it should be. I didn’t fully understand the scope and scale of how important mental health was until I was an adult and it was began affecting my personal relationships. So for me this piece is about my journey to understand how my brain works a little. When I am anxious I have one of two faces. I am either transfixed on my phone putting a barrier between the rest of the world and myself so that I may calm down my anxious mind or I am laughing, making jokes, overall being overtly silly to displace the anxious feelings that I have. So this is the duality of my own anxiety.”

Phillip McConnell is a 31-year-old artist from Trenton, New Jersey whose work is abstract, surrealist digital artwork called Glitch Art. Glitch Art is the aesthetic of digital errors, created by corrupting the data of pictures. He uses varying techniques and different coding languages. Within his work, he discusses his experience as well as his personal world view.