RETROFLEX

I often think about how kids instinctively bend backwards, flip their heads, stare at the world upside down. No one teaches them this. It just happens. A shared reflex, maybe a shared memory. Something ancient in the body wants to test the edges of what is seen and felt. To twist the given and make it strange. That gesture that asks nothing, explains nothing, but changes the air around it. A kind of playful research that feels more real than any instruction.

It’s not a trick. Not a show. Just something essential unfolding. Maybe they’re not just playing. Maybe they’re trying to stretch sense itself. Bend it until it leaks something new.

2023~

NO TRICKS
NOT FOR SHOW

Before thinking takes over, the body already knows.

That’s what I keep learning.

Animals do it too in their own ways. Not as metaphor but motion. It made me pause. Maybe distortion is just another name for sensing deeply, as if midway through thought—the way a dream resists conclusion.

Retroflex came after Contortion, but it doesn’t continue it. It folds inward. It holds memory, reflex, a whisper from somewhere before I knew language. These works are not about expression. They are about the involuntary acts of staying alive. They bend, not to impress, but to wake something that refuses to sit still.

Retroflex is where the body remembers something the adult mind forgot to ask.