Fighting with Embalancement is part of the Objectified Beliefs sub-collection within Fragmented Harmony, and belongs to a sculptural series examining the psychic architecture of medicated life in American consumer culture.

The work features a vertical stack of three personal prescription bottles—medications regularly taken by the artist—crowned with a small mirrored disco ball. The top bottle tilts forward, barely holding its position. This minimal construction becomes a portrait of precarious balance, a critique of emotional survival in a system where care is outsourced, privatized, and increasingly aestheticized.

The disco ball, symbol of joy and social performance, transforms here into a fragile metaphor for mental health spectacle—glittering at the edge of collapse. Its presence doesn’t celebrate, but asks: What have we built this happiness on?

In this piece, the artist does not assume the role of external critic, but rather places himself inside the system under scrutiny. The bottles are real. The dependencies are real. The critique is pointed, but shared. This is not just a commentary on a culture of pharmaceutical coping and consumer convenience—it is a confession of participation, a self-aware embodiment of the very imbalance it reveals.

Fighting with Embalancement plays with medical language, invention, and irony. The title—part diagnosis, part resistance—suggests a struggle against being chemically stabilized, aesthetically embalmed, or emotionally managed. The work refuses neutrality, exposing the tension between the desire to appear well and the hidden labor of staying functional.

Across this series, the question persists: When emotional survival is engineered through chemicals and curated rituals, where does belief reside? In the pill? The performance? Or the moment of collapse, we keep postponing?

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