ANYTHING BUT HUMAN: Light/enlightenment/Language

Friday, December 2, 2011

Light/enlightenment/Language

The theme of this mornings post is light, enlightenment and language and by necessity, shadow, gestures, semiotics and technics. Kyriaki Maragozidis's photograph of an open hand shadow falling on a Lotus leaf injects the self into the image in a subtle way; the raised hand as gesture is both welcome and impasse, a moment of contemplation in which she embraces the leaf, but her touch leaves no impact upon glorious nature. Ethereal touch is also implied in Aliey Ball's painting in which perception, linked to the many eyes that cry a river of tears reaches out to the one who sleeps. Too many eyes and too many hands, and the terrors of creativity. The veiled figure in Juan Ford's painting The Disconnector, occupies a third of the space against a soft and smooth ethereal sky; light forming its own language in the shadows of the creased gown ~ the arm unmistakably pointing to or pointing away from enlightenment. But we cannot see the vision that the shaman sees, we understand only that a dichotomy prevails. Without light there can be no shadows and this is most gloriously seen in Clinton Hayden's photograph in which strange glyphs are formed by a lacy curtain draped over a window. The self, or evidence of self perception in all of these artworks may be read in Simon Park's photograph of bio-luminescent bacteria that assert a sense of agency in their formation of a trident glyph, symbolic at least in human terms as representing past, present and future. The iridescent, almost skeletal digits reminiscent of metal filaments in an incandescent light globe, speak of light and dark, ignorance and perception ~ a feature of my own photograph as well as that of Charles Strebor, whose eye with cloud forming on the crystalline lens is a dark planet in a milky sky. Many thanks to all the artists who have kindly given me permission to reproduce these images.