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| college | of the senses | postcards | from tokyo | ||||||
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| © 2010 | dvsc media |
FEATURED COLLECTIONS THE COLLEGE OF THE SENSES -The series began in 1993 with three full color panoramic 4"x10.5" photo collages blending religious iconography with secular and erotic images. In 1996, I recomposed the trio into black and white dry wax transfer digital images on to 9"x12" vellum card stock. Four years later, I expanded the series to seven images fully intending to create fifteen collages; but seven was all she wrote. The slowly dissolving endless loop slide show that links to this page approximates my original display strategy; except on a cinematic scale like Vista Vision. POSTCARDS FROM TOKYO - From 2004 to 2007 my nephew worked in Tokyo as an English instructor. He used the camera function of his Japanese "smart phone" to document the expatriot club scene. I received regular postings from him in the form of email picture files that I archived like visual dispatches from the Orient . Around 2006, I started to use his night life images as a springboard to develop mixed media cityscape paintings, a process that continues to engage me to this day. ELEVEN THOUSAND VIRGINS PREVIEW - In many respects, Eleven Thousand Virgins completes the journey I began 17 years ago with The College of the Senses series; exploring the tensions between eros and spirituality. In 2003, I began to create Sublime style digital photorealistic landscapes with virtual nude figures. These subjects embodied the search for meaning we often travel from passion, desire and obsession to spiritual transformation. Within 18 months I created 120 computer generated and painted scenes. I printed sixty five onto paper; reworked them with color pencils, and organized them into an artist's book called Eleven Thousand Virgins. After the book I went on to make a variety of larger scale mixed media drawings from the same material. The title Eleven Thousand Virgins is one of those magical numbers that resonates with power and mystery. It also calls to mind the 9th century legend of St. Bridget, the Irish princess who made a pilgrimage to Rome accompanied by an entourage of eleven thousand virgins! I have annotated 19 seminal images from the series archives to illustrate the evolution of my creative process as the structure of this narrative without words unfolded from 2003 to 2006. |