The Brute lives in this world. The Brute lives in our world. The Brute covers its powerful body in the Earth’s clay. Though its ears are covered, it hears its mind enter a world that is methodically senseful. Though its eyes and nose are covered, it trusts its body to enter a world that reconstructs psyches and teaches self about self from self.

The Brute is not an illusion, but a portrait of the moment between exertion and recovery; the performance of our most animalistic and primordial subconscious, coinciding not with the way things are supposed to be, but with the way things have to be.

At this point one begins to understand how, the combination of the separate domains of power, dominance, and sexuality into one element, develops a duality of our conscious and teaches us the ephemeral, intra-workings of our own identities.

The crisp salt flats cracked beneath my naked feet as I lugged the rigid concrete form through the barren white plains. It stood over three feet high, sprawled out six feet in length, and imposed a staggering fourteen-hundred pounds on my beaten body. I desperately clung to the manila rope while the crunching of the salt below the rolling concrete billowed, overtaking any sounds from myself. Tired and weathered by the scorching sun, the clay parched and began to crack across my stale flesh. For 1 mile, in 102 degree heat I pulled, before collapsing in defeat. I breathed heavily; my heart thumped. In this moment of collapse, I had finally found the real obstacle I must attempt to overcome—to stand tattered, to continue on.

Recovery lasted eight days.