A Kismet artist statement

By the time I landed in Budapest, my head was full of Echoes. This is my word for coincidences, and reverberations of the collective unconscious. They’re clues, reminders that reality is but a dream. They can sneak up on you like déjà vu, or trip your internal search engine, and link up disparate dots into a recognizable pattern. I learned all this at 13 from Miller, the character who tended the burn barrel in the cult film Repo Man:

“A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.”

Something changes when you open up to Echoes. It’s like walking into a movie, or a book. Innate narrative instincts kick in, the watcher inside settles back, and disbelief is suspended. So when it is against all habit to do so, you will with absolute certainty and ease sit down next to a complete stranger in a foreign airport, and say, “You’re here for the artists’ residency.” “How did you know?” says the stranger who now seems like a long lost friend.

I spent only 10 days at the International Artists’ Residency in Hungary, but it seemed like time protracted to allow several complete plots to unfold. People reported having recurrent feelings of déjà vu, and we started to hypothesize about what some called The Hungarian Effect. In other words, you can take a person out of their socio-political sphere, but you can’t take that sphere out of the person, except if you send them to Hungary. Drinking their coffee also seems to help – must be the famously rejuvenating water.

Making art seems to be a process of divination, a method for extracting things from the collective unconscious. An artist is really a kind of dowser, so it seems likely that a convergence of them in such an Echoing place like Budapest would result in tapping some form of synchronicity.

I made this diorama for the Kismet exhibit, pushing beyond my 2D illustration habits to reflect how going to Hungary has expanded my little world.

- Bridget Riversmith
artist/animator