Habatat International Invitational 2005
My work concerns itself with images of archetypal dimension, drawing from religion, myth and indigenous folk art from around the world to convey what Dr. Carl Jung has called “the language of the psyche”. While these images have tended to embody ancient and iconographic subjects, there are many current images, generally of people, but of objects too, that have moved from the realm of the personal into the world of the mythopoetic, that is, the archetypal. Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, the destruction of the World Trade Centers on 9/11 are among such modern archetypal images. My piece “Golden Girl” uses the images of Elvis Presley and the Beatles, among others to stand face to face with such modern iconographic images. Few of us have ever met these people, yet in our psyches their images represent much that we embody as “western” civilized people. To confront and analyze these icons is more than just a novelty, it is a way to come to understand who we are and what our core beliefs consist of. To us in the west, Elvis was not just an entertainer; he was a modern example of what the Greeks called a demiurge, a heavenly being of vast creative power. The powers he embodied are powers unleashed in the modern American psyche. My work is an attempt to uncover and analyze images that we, culturally, tend to internalize and take for granted. Ultimately we are who we imagine ourselves to be, whether we know it or not, and it is no accident that the word imagine has its roots in that most prolific and creative of words, “image”.