Columbia City Gallery
Featured Art Group Show
Opening Reception
Saturday, July 1, 2017
5-7pm
Wine & refreshments will be served.
Transform – (amphibious lungs)
I’m SO excited to announce my 11th show (in a year) — which also happens to be my first Featured Art Show!!! I will be presenting the first 5 panels of my new series, My Life in 24 Frames. These are my most recent pieces, all created within the past 4 months.
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen this body of work evolve. But of course, it is impossible to capture these pieces in a still photograph. They need to be seen, experienced, and (dare I say) felt, in person. The self-portrait, for one, changes radically depending on your viewpoint…
This series was inspired by a recurring dream I had as a kid. I recently had the dream again, and wrote about it in my journal. The free association that followed was the seed that inspired this series.
From my journal: I remember a recurring dream where I would be running away from “bad guys.” I would jump into a lake and hold my breath as long as possible, trying to go undetected. They stood over the water, watching for any sign of life — ripples, movement, air bubbles. When I realized they weren’t going away, I started to panic because I was running out of breath. And I knew surfacing meant certain death.
Suddenly, I remember that I have always had the power to breathe underwater –that my body is capable of taking in water, and extracting the oxygen I need to survive.
As I relax, I breathe the water slowly and deeply into my lungs…and return to breathing as I did in the womb. The safest, calmest, most peaceful state of coming into being. Breathing with ease, with fluid-filled lungs. Life giving, nurturing, affirming, an amphibic existence of breathing easefully underwater.
That is, until the fluid is forced out of the lungs with a cry—a violent entry into this new world of loud sounds and bright lights. And pain. A rude awakening into a new way of being. Everything too harsh and close, loud and immediate, and fundamentally apart from you.
Hibernate
There now exists a You, apart, separate, distinct from everything and everyone else. And the rest of your life will become about re-learning that we are all, in fact, one. We are all connected. Our beings are interdependent, our lives entangled in a shared knowing and existing that connects my exhale to a plant’s inhale, my ashes to a seedling. We ‘nurse log’ each other, and have for centuries. Our death sustains and enables new life. And generations, like tides, continue to build on what came before. We are all here because of each other. Our survival has depended on the health and well-being of every living being currently on this planet—and all those who came before.
We need to remember this moving forward. Because we are at risk of forgetting, to the detriment of us all. Water is Life. Life is breath. Death births Life. Everything is Connected.
I want to create a storyboard of connection where the viewer ascribes meaning to the order and transition from one image to the next. We humans are wired to make sense of what we see…but the stories we create are informed by our lived experiences, real or imagined, our perspectives, our dreams, our fears and traumas. We take all that we are, and use our lives as a filter through which we see the world, and ascribe meaning to our existence. This is my life in a constantly evolving set of 24 frames…
Reflect (2017 self-portrait)