Pony Up 23

Pony Up 23

There was nothing remarkable about this piece at the beginning.

It started as a form. A gesture. A movement that could have gone anywhere or nowhere. I almost left it alone.

But I didn’t.

The longer I stayed with it, the more it began to rear up.

At first glance, you might see a guitar. The curve of a body. The sweep of strings. The familiar tension of a hand meeting instrument.

Look again.

There is something else rising inside it — something animal. Something muscular. Something that refuses to remain decorative.

The guitar does not sit politely in this image. It does not wait to be played. It becomes force.

“Pony up” is a phrase about stepping forward. About paying what is owed. About choosing to rise instead of remaining seated.

This piece carries that energy.

The form leans left, heavy and grounded, but the lines on the right stretch like reins or wind or tension pulling against restraint. The black fields are not empty space; they are pressure. And inside that pressure — buried in the lower right shadow — there is a micro spark.

Not on the surface.
Not flashing for attention.
But forming.

Energy does not always explode outward.
Sometimes it gathers.

Without Square has never been about making an object disappear. It has been about allowing it to destabilize just enough to reveal process. In Pony Up 23, the object does not dissolve — it transforms.

The instrument and the animal share a body.

The strings are no longer just strings.
They are tension lines.
Control lines.
Possibility lines.

Is it a horse becoming a guitar?
Is it a guitar becoming a horse?
Or is it simply force taking the shape it needs in order to move?

The piece does not answer.

It rises.

And sometimes that is enough.