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Life After Life Images
Artist's Statement
In October of 2003 my mother suffered from several strokes leaving her a shell of her former self. During the same month my younger brother died unexpectedly in a car accident. Shortly after that my father was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. I have essentially become my parents’ parent. I have never had a great relationship with my dad and have fostered a closer relationship with another man, my minister. I have found out that he has lung cancer which has spread to the lymph nodes. Recently I went to the wake of a dear friend of mine who died of lung cancer. The more living I do the more dying I see. I think I have a good relationship with God but all of these things have pushed my faith to the edge. I have looked to God for answers and believe with deep conviction that life continues after we leave this earth. This body of work is intended to be a photographic expression of what I believe happens to us after we die.
My view of spirituality is not to be confused with religion, which I believe is man-made and meant to control its members. A religion holds man to his primate fleshy existence, whereas spirituality liberates him. Religion is a man-made doctrine that puts man in control and power; on the other hand, spirituality and the spiritual gifts that come from above humble man and put God in control and power. Spirituality will always dominate, as it is greater than everything tangible around us. It will never succumb to man-made doctrine; the more man seeks spirituality, the further away he gets from religion. I began working on these images shortly after my brother’s passing. It is my intention to show the journey that I believe the soul takes after it leaves the body and its final resting place. It is a communicative essay of multi-dimensional spiritual realism.
I am very attracted to the paintings that Turner did for their translucent and ethereal qualities. My connection to Turner is on a spiritual level. I get a sense of meditative flow from his work, perhaps due to the movement of color as well as the pliable structures in his paintings that are not quite real. He looked at nature with fresh eyes as he painted air, water, and fire, and he transformed their colors into a luminescent glow. His paintings are emotionally charged. Monet in a similar way used colors that blend into muted questionable forms that leave the viewer with a sense of uncertainty. This uncertainty is what I presently feel about the spiritual world. Using the dematerialization of matter may help me to express the change that people make as they leave their bodies to take on the next form and existence of life. This breakdown of recognizable forms into objects of light has led me on this journey from reality to spirituality. By adding or taking away parts from my images I intend to reveal unique perceptions of space and time. Lee Friedlander included spatial separations in his photographs by including reflections of himself and others. This technique exposed multiple dimensions in his work. Using reflections as well as double exposures is a way of conveying this depth as an additional level of life. Please enjoy my visual journey from life to life.
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