Artist Statement - Lucas Perry

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It’s been four years since I transferred here. Much of my time here can be summarized in four words: A semi living hell. The toughest part of school to me was never the academics but more the social aspect. It was never really hard for me to make friends if I tried. It was mostly just hard to keep them. Seventh grade was by far the worst of these years: a pandemic, online learning, and hoards of prepubescent kids in arrested development definitely didn’t help the already predestined horrors of middle school. Throughout the years my greatest vice and perhaps solace could be found in music. It could first be seen in comfortingly pleasant tunes of TXT, then the eerily astute lyrics of Marina, the raw, enchanting sound of Mitski soon after, the engrossing sound waves of the Psychedelic Furs, and most recently the sounds of 80s rock and metal. Despite the variety, it's the exact same each time. I pop in those headphones, start the music, and I just sit quietly, watching.

I currently have about three different groups of friends I visit from time to time. Though recently I’ve anchored myself at the largest of them. This group has the most variety of characters. Some may find them peculiar at first glance but soon enough they tend to find themselves enthralled in them. This group is split into around four quadrants. I say this as an estimate as I find I can never really tell where each group ends and the other begins. There are an array of faces I see every day but there are some that I just can’t seem to shake.

At twelve we congregate at an oak tree with barely enough room for us all. I usually sit on the floor as there’s no seating by the time I get there. I don’t really care though. By the time lunch rolls around my main focus is pretty much just eating my baked potato. The first person I talk to is usually my depressed artist friend. We have most of the same breaks usually spent looking at photos of tiny frogs on Pinterest. Her dream is to be reincarnated as a crow in her next life. You notice after a while though that she’s not as depressed as she is just generally apathetic. She’ll often wryly crack a joke at your other friend, the sensitive academic. Her main goal in life is to one-up everyone in their Japanese class. She’ll usually respond to these jokes stirring a lunch-long debate about some inane subject.

By this time I usually drift away to some other subgroup. As I search for someone to talk to, my twin sneaks up upon me. His general greeting is usually a pinch to the back. I think it’s important to clarify we’re not actually twins, we just generally look alike and have the same distaste for certain people and things. Either way, he’s there asking me how my day was or if he could borrow my P.E. uniform for the hundredth time. His presence is somewhat brief as he ventures on to find something else. We’re similar in that way, we can’t easily be tethered. At this point my mind seems as if it’s about to implode from my irritant rapid fire thoughts. It is at this moment I am approached by a kid. He’s a strange kid with an even stranger sense of humor. The only way I can think to describe him is if a bisexual hermit crab with a constantly blushing face and the slightest semblance of a mustache was a teen boy. “I’m bored” he says, “Entertain me.” For some reason he always talks to me when he’s bored. I usually chalk it up to the fact that he loves to make fun of my dancing and compare me to the character Jess from New Girl.

This is when my other friend comes to rescue me from this endless comparison. She can be described as a chatty, stylish theater kid with a seemingly appropriate level of drama for one. She often talks of her budding new romance and her nemesis, though she’s too proud to admit they’re really enemies. I talk her out of her overthinking tendencies with the hopes that she’ll finally manage to pull a girl. The next friend in this sequence is a social butterfly with the music taste of a main character in an indie film. He stokes most of the conversations, somehow managing to talk to everyone by the time lunch ends. When you’re near him you can’t help but notice the girl who seems to follow. She has the style of a coquette grandma with the personality of a yassified Michael Myers. She leads the group commanding everyone’s attention to her paragraphs of imagined grandeur. One can often find a short gamer boy resting his head on her shoulder like a leech. This is all I will say about leech boy as I feel this sentence sums up the importance of his presence in this account. To the right of this group, contains the person that perhaps people find the most outrageous. A metalhead with the most peculiar sense of humor. He’s perhaps the funniest of the group always managing a laugh from most everyone in the group.

At this point, the minutes left of lunch are slowly dwindling down. I sit at the corner of the tree with perhaps the most reserved of the bunch. I sit down next to one of my friends from last semester. Today he is taking photos of the ground on his silver digital camera. He’s never without some form of camera at his side. I ask him what he’s taking a picture of. He claims it's an ant with an oddly shaped head. He zooms the camera in to show me what he means. He’s often talking about some new astronomy news or some random Elon Musk meme. He then grabs his sleek, black satchel that he’s used since his normal backpack broke, and trudges along to class. Then I wander upon a boy with curly hair similar to that of Victiorian dolls that are always possessing people in movies. He has a very unnerving stare which is soon negated by the fact that he insists on insulting my height. After this he’ll return to his phone watching some random gaming videos. At this point I’m leaving for whatever class I have next and slowly count down the hours till I can go home.