We are bombarded with advertisements on billboards, cars, television, and in the sky. News, e-mail, weather updates, images of war, social networking pages, and stories of loss, hunger, and natural and man-made disasters are delivered to our computers and phones night and day. These are the external things, the information, data, and titillating images that impinge on our senses, demanding our attention in a hundred different ways.
And we are bombarded from within as well, by our own unremitting thought cycles: a constant loop of hopes and fears, dreams and worries, a relentless anxiety against the specter of which we yearn to predict and control the future. It is this very angst which further impacts the quality and future of our relationships, our health, the health of those we care about, and our dreams of accomplishment and success, as we find ourselves toiling, as hero or villain of the stories we tell ourselves, in the shadow of our mortality.
These are the hundred storms that batter us internally and externally, creating chaos and a heightened sense of disarray that cannot be tamed as long as we refuse to examine all of the fragments.
What, exactly, are these fragments? How can we engage in a dialogue with chaos that advances, rather than alienates us, from the interior and exterior events that invade and infuse our lives?
Using photographic collage, the images in the “Seven Questions” exhibition are a dialogue with the theoretical questions postulated by Jungian and Gestalt philosophy, whose purpose it is to make conscious the shadowy underworld of the chaotic unconscious—questions which are, by their very nature, an acknowledgement of the healing potential of this chaos. Collage acts as visual representation of the tension that arises in the fragmented, questioning self, as we parse the line between chaos as conveyer of great pain, and chaos as harbinger of great revelation. The end result, for questioner and viewer alike, is an overarching beauty that both embodies, and transcends, the sum of its parts.
(The questions, designed to initiate a conversation between yourself and a dream figure or various aspects of yourself are: Who are you and what are you? What is my life purpose? What do you like about yourself or what you do? What do you dislike about yourself or what you do? What is your greatest fear? What is your greatest desire or what do you want more than anything else? What is your gift to the world? )