Present Past: Fundamental Image
Can a single image reveal Who We Are? Can it represent a point of inception in understanding ourselves and our highly subjective and interpretive experience of the world?
A fundamental image is a place of re-cognition that we continually return to, thoughtfully, habitually, or unconsciously, even if only understood in retrospect, in order to know yet again for the first time. It is part of a visual and linguistic eternal return that morphs as we see it through different eyes, but the essence of which remains the same. One&Seven initiated our collaboration bearing these visual and symbolic representations of artistic and personal identity and history that reside at the core of individual thinking and frame our unique points of view.
Farah Marie Velten
I Put My Body Into It
Cyanotype on archival watercolor paper, 22" x 90"
2020
Farah Marie Velten’s analogue photography and alternative printing processes serve as tools for asking questions on the act of seeing.
I Put My Body Into It, part of a larger series, confronts the state of existence through documenting the self. What does it mean to exist?
Through recording the body by means of tracing a crossroads of time and space am I able to visually express my mind? Spirit? Can you "see" my soul? How much space does my soul take up? How much time does it take to record my soul? If I shared my internal experience in creating this record would that change what you see? Are you confronting your own self in seeing my self? Can we separate the two?
Judith Lipton
Force None
Eggshells, dimensions variable
2007, 2015, ongoing
Judith Lipton’s work explores themes of absence and presence, and addresses the enduring dilemma: How can one evoke the ephemeral through material means? Her ongoing installation, Force-None (2005, 2015), confronts the viewer with the experience of loss through the fragile and emptied out interiors of cracked eggshells. Lipton provokes the spectator with the tension between the fragility of life bound up with the inevitability of destruction and waste.
James Weber
Bario Tokio, PR
1971
James Weber picked up a camera and embarked on studying and pursuing photography soon after his return from combat experience as a young Paratrooper in Vietnam. It was this art form that became his catharsis from those early life experiences. James's approach to the camera is that it is a mechanical device enabling the recording of what he sees and perceives at any given moment. The resulting images often reveal what he could not fully comprehend at the moment of capture, and this serves to form a compelling process of capture and recognition of his world.
Lisa di Donato
Untitled (self-portrait)
Charcoal on Lenox paper, 26” x 36”
1999
With an emphasis on process, Lisa di Donato’s artworks are depictions of landscapes, architectures and forms that are no longer, nor have they become something else, yet.
There is simultaneously an ecstatic dance of generation and destruction and a precarious stillness in the suspension of time between these two points of expectation. In this indeterminacy, divergent aspects such as the sensual and mental are presented as reciprocal, and distinctions fundamental to our understanding of where and when we are fall away or are complicated. All of this attends to an ongoing fascination with the complexities of becoming, experience, perception and reality.
Silvio Wolf
The Two Doors
C-print face-mounted to plexiglass, 49.25” x 33.5”
1981
‘Mental Space’
That which I represent / Is a visible image / Of my thought.
Of thought that sees / And recognizes itself / In that which already is.
Coincidence of position / Physical and mental / Of being and space.
Places of transition / Inside and outside.
Complementary opposition / Of ubiquitous antagonists.
I unveil the world of the unseen / I represent that which I do not know.
— S.W. 1980
Leah Poller
Self Portrait: Tu Oses
Bronze, 16.5″ x 12″ x 12″
Who am I? Where do I exist? Am I fully alive to my existence? Am I a figment of my imagination? A never-ending choreography of the struggle of real vs reality? Am I present? Is my self-portrait proof of an existence? Mine? Can I greet it from outside me to inside me: “How do you do?” … “How?”… “Do you?”… “Do.” Did it come to me through consciousness? Intention? Willfulness? Was it always there, waiting to appear? Visible … or not, to anyone beside me? Have I trapped consciousness in a form and shape that exists in time and space, somewhere?
Ask.
Try to Answer.
The immutable matter of bronze leads me down the path of the alchemist to create a singular, durable, concrete language in a distributed representation of life (Me! My life!) … transmuted through my portraits. As I create a portrait, I create myself. Conscious of what I am doing – the inner and outer dance - I grab pixels in 3 dimensions and align them with an awareness responsible for creating, giving birth, a second dimension after motherhood, driven by the quest to find soul. I sculpt. Therefore, I am.
Rick Raymond
Untitled
An avocational photographer, Rick Raymond began making images while traveling South America as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He continued his documentary activities throughout of his experiences as an educator, a personal coach, mentor to entrepreneurs, a former oceanographer, seeker of spiritual wisdom, an advocate for indigenous elderhood in today’s culture, a husband and a father.
His approach to photography is based on an intention for awareness of the tactile and visceral moments - being responsive to placement, movement, light, flow, tone and texture - the easily overlooked, subtle, common-placed realities of our environment.