India Montage Series

India Montage Series

Artist Statement 2000

Through manipulating elements of people from various photographs using a computer, I arrive at digital montages in between drawing, painting, and photography. For the images in color, I use photographs recently taken in India.

In each of these figures in my India Series I try to unite opposites such as youth and age, male and female, contentment and restlessness, distorting in opposing directions. This places the figures in a fluid, often discordant, state of transition; hopefully encouraging us to question what animates the body.

The surrounding space contributes a stillness that both contains and permeates the figures. There, however, exists an opposing sensual resonance where the figures seem to transition between one world and another.

My spiritual beliefs are the inspiration for this series. Central to these beliefs is the precept that we are not the body. Instead, “we are a soul who ‘has or wears a mind and body’,” says Rajinder Singh, an internationally recognized expert teacher of meditation.

At the time of death, it is said, we take only two things with us: what we learn about love, and the consequences of our actions. Accumulated over the course of this lifetime and many others, these consequences then become another kind of covering worn by the soul. The way to break free of our sensual attachments is to have them washed away by the bliss and comfort of the love that we receive from within when we sit in meditation.

In short, my work is more a search for truth than it is a search for beauty.

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