Artist J. Larkin focuses on symbols and attributes inherent in organic subjects in an effort to bring the viewer closer to the relevance of a living thing’s imprint on the inner mind. He pits his better nature against his inner demons to create emotional and analytical parity in his work.

With nature a perpetual inspiration, Larkin has drawn his own pliant appraisals about parallels and contrasts regarding the roles of symbiosis, struggle, cohabitation and extinction that are the wages of life on Earth. In nearly every piece of art he has executed there is the consideration of the relationships and similarities between humans and other animals. He feeds these assessments through subconscious filters, grinds them through the process of critical consideration, and assigns them roles in his pantheon of symbols.

In Larkin's world, the medium of flesh and mind become interchangeable, and the players on his stage coexist in ways that make it impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins. It is a place where dreams and nightmares coexist and intermingle, often exchanging roles to experience the other.

Physical aspects of the work include many forms of traditional and experimental media including painting, drawing, small sculpture inclusion and fiber arts. Larkin most often employs techniques developed by close study of the familiar organic form. There are emblematic reasons behind the use of certain media just as there are often subconsciously driven purposes behind the actual compositions. The works are frequently windows into one’s own need to understand the unknown, and often portals to odd small places, ornately invading our shared world at their borders.

Larkin's art requires a suspension of reliance upon traditional purposes of iconography, and begs a willingness to give in to one's own first impulse of interpretation to identify personally with the subjects in the imagery. It demands from the viewer a desire to get close to uncomfortable anxieties, and a readiness to engage old pain with open arms. In embracing the humor in the abyss, the vision of J. Larkin is fully realized.

This machine shouldn’t work but it does, and flawlessly. Exactly how it works and what it’s supposed to do I haven’t been able to determine yet. All of its components sync up in perfect accord, and an unknown substance courses continually through all of these veins, intestines, tubes and esophageal passages that make up the circulatory arrangement of this contraption.

Someone must have been collecting parts for this thing for years, the biological segments are in varying states of decay. Though their connections to the inorganic parts are rusted and dripping pus I can’t pull them apart no matter how hard I try. The machine has eyes, hundreds of them, from different types of animals and people still peering out through disembodied portions of their suffering faces.
I recognize parts of a horse’s head grafted to the face of an angelfish near the machine’s constantly chomping mechanical mouth. Further along its systems are four human elbows violently chugging and gyrating in unison outside what closely resembles an old cast iron potbellied stove. A choking baby’s mouth sprouts blades of fresh green grass next to a fin that flaps so fast it vibrates. Beads of spray escape the grate next to this, but never know the world outside the machine because tiny maws at the end of flexible stalks dart out and gulp up every drop before they hit the floor that the thing is bolted to. Identifiable portions of extinct species dating back great spans of time are still living and moving to keep this thing doing whatever it does, this thing it must have always done. It’s been here a billion years if it’s been here a day, and I hate it.
The malleable and fleshy factors are connected internally by a transparent web of sinews, organic tubes and glass-like jointed limbs to iron and copper moving parts protected by stone facades that also hide wooden gears that rotate at blinding speed.
The hum of the whole drowns out the gnashing of its friction and the screams of its own collective agony.
Or maybe these things actually combine to produce the hum.
There is so much noise; it’s so hard to tell.

The exhaust from its labors vomits forth from every human face that has ever drawn breath, polluting our lives with its excesses. Its sole source of sustenance is derived from our own psychological side effects, the mental and emotional waste we produce as a result of the terror that the machine has gifted us with at our deepest layers. Even with such an abysmal link to it there’s no way to know its purpose, or by association our own.

It’s possible that its sole ambition is to simply exist as it does, and that’s what terrifies me. That it might have no real purpose beyond its function implies that all is as it should be and nothing need ever change.

Spicing the skin of our world are the tiny infections that we lovingly culture with our desires and fears, each pustule a safe home for a million hungry nightmares that willfully enter and nurture the machine. The understanding between it and us is one of uncomfortable symbiosis that defines all we can ever know.

My family was poor, and every family in our building was as well. We had the worst apartment in our building; the one in the attic. It was sweltering in the summer and in winter we froze. The rent was ninety dollars a month. It wasn’t worth half of that.

I can’t imagine where our mother was that night. She was always there.
My brother and I sat across a huge table, a plywood plank on sawhorses actually, in the single room of our windowless watchtower domicile. The surrounding shelves were bare splintered wood held together with rusted roofing nails sparsely populated with cans of food we all hated and jars of things reserved for invited company that never came. The jars remained unopened though we had company that night.

The Cigar Man was a thin and wrinkled old bastard with a filthy charcoal gray suit that might have been made of real charcoal. His thinning gray hair frizzed outward from his spotted pate and the acrid yellow light from a single bare bulb in the doorway lit it into a perverted halo. One of his eyes was unusually small; the other was impossibly big, cataracted and lazy. There was a crusty orange residue in the corners of his mouth as if he had been eating the guts of pumpkins and had fallen asleep. His teeth were sharp brown triangles that he licked when he receded his thin lips.
Between his caked yellow claws was an oversized cigar, an exaggeration of itself like a cartoon prop. Thin wisps of malodorous smoke rose from it and collected at the crotched ceiling of the room. He sat at the end of the plank a few feet from where my brother and I ate stale graham crackers from paper plates.
We were just babies, really. I had just turned five, and my brother was still a couple months short of four candles on his cake.

We didn’t deserve it.

With reflexes impossible to detect, the Cigar Man was underneath my brother in his chair, and with a grin that extended past his ears he compacted the monstrous cigar into his poor little mouth. With a fistful of the toddler’s hair in one hand and a grip on the fat cigar in the other he exuded strange and horrible music from his pores. The sour and cacophonous notes bled into the surrounding air as the smoke poured from my brother’s nose, ears and the corners of his eyes. His muffled screams have never stopped.

On top of a steep, bare stone mountain I find myself on a plateau covered in fields of harvested grain. The summer yield's remains are sun blasted brown, stubby and coarse. The surrounding terrain is littered with baked bones, old steel engine parts and black plastic garbage bags matted to the ground. I’m standing in the middle of all this (which spreads around me about a mile in all directions) next to a weather beaten wooden shack that might have been painted gray long ago; the paint is peeled and faded with time.
I’ve been painting with thick black oil on the metal surface of an oversized tuba (about 8 feet tall) what appears to be a maze pattern. After a section of the painted work has had time to dry it beads up and disappears. I don’t know why I keep trying.

I’m joined by a couple of men; clearly they’re drunk and feeling like pulling pranks. They’re middle aged, fat and grizzled with wiry gray beards. They are almost certainly twins. They’re wearing matching stained denim overalls caked with flaking old food with hair stuck in it. They stumble to the edge of the plateau and jump over the edge of it with a squeal of delight and fall down the side of the mountain to the bottom, there is a small house down there where an old woman lives alone. There are two black horses in the yard, which I think was the point of this excursion. I somehow sense that they are going to hurt the horses and maybe the old lady too. There’s going to be trouble, and I’d better get down there.

Going over the side, I never thought falling would be so fast. I didn’t think we were so high up. This is going to hurt.
Rather than the painful landing I was expecting I simply find myself on the ground below at the Old woman’s house. I can hear the drunken brothers and the horses out back, they’re making a lot of noise. The men are hooting and hollering and carrying on, and the horses are screaming. I have no idea what’s going on back there, but I’d better put a stop to it. I’ll go through the house, which will be quicker.

I’m in the house, It’s dark and much bigger inside than I would have imagined but also very cluttered with boxes, way too much furniture, and ancient Greco-roman style sculptures.
I’m carrying around a giant, transparent inflated balloon that seems to be breathing in and out and it’s hard to move around in here. I’m trying to avoid the old lady altogether. If I can, I would rather get rid of these guys without her involvement altogether. The balloon keeps smacking against everything and when it does it makes a dull hollow sound that reverberates through the entire house. I have to get out of here, I’m going to get caught. Besides, it’s hot as hell in here. How did I not notice that until now?

Going back out the door I came in through, I turn around to face the house. I see that everything’s changed. The house is gone as are the men and the horses and the breathing balloon in my hand has become an air filled clear plastic bag just blowing around in the wind. I crumple it to put it in my pocket, but every time I manage to get one part of it crunched down another part re-inflates. This isn’t going to work. I let go of the bag and it drifts away on the wind like a floating jellyfish to join the others that are already in the sky. In the distance I hear the brothers laughing again through a thick fog across a dusty plain. I have to take care of this; they are going to really cause a lot of trouble. They are of envoys misfortune and despair and I need to kill them.

This is going to be a long day.