Building on the ritual vestiges of the jaguar deity, lord of the night, Phantasy draws on the artist’s own practice as a mask maker as well as from study with older generations of mask makers and the history of mask making in the peripheries of Mexico. The work synthesizes two years of practice research and explores the use of phantasy as a double paradox: on one hand, it is exercised as a weaponized aporia of sovereignty; on the other hand, it is simultaneously a refuge for the oppressed through song, the sacred, and the imaginal. Unearthing the chains of new forms of enslavement bound by the captivity of the mind, the jaguar represents the mind in an unrestrained state: tempestuous, destructive yet sublime, and a symbol dispossessed to mere savagery. The jaguar in its subversive manifestation maintains the illusion of reality or decides to shred it. The enemy, or obsidian mirror [the obsidian which is the heart of the mountain in Mexican thought], regent and patron of slaves, prisoners, warriors and outlaws, enters another realm of corrupting hybridity through the synthetic. Working from arte povera to create a Gesamtkunstwerk that transforms the artist’s night walks in the forest alongside the Hudson River in an attempt to render the healing call of the heart.