Click here for a virtual gallery tour and artist talk of Ardea’s exhibition at Art Incubate.
”In my art, I examine the relationship between individuality and connection, because of the desire I feel for both states. My current paintings examine relationships between inner and outer spaces: caves and openings, indoors and outdoors, bodies and nature, in order to question the relationship of self and other.
Uncertainty as to whether the viewers’ eye moves inward or outward leads to philosophical questions of how space is structured. The movements of the images also involve viewers in the yearnings that inspired them. In some cases, human figures accentuate the movements of the eye, reaching, falling, or balancing, opening or closing. Birds, agents from the outside, also occasionally lead the movement.
The title for my latest exhibition, “Folds and False Caves,” comes from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Tibetan Buddhist scriptures on the nature of self. Deleuze describes an individual identity as a fold in the continuous fabric of everything. The scriptures speak of a “false cave” of human perception, as well as describing long sojourns in caves where the practitioner learns to become one with the darkness and thus the outer world.
In moments, the amount of space that I identify as self expands and contracts. Whether I see myself as a small creature within a vast universe of otherness, or an all-pervading presence that I cannot escape, the relationship is always complex. Sometimes I desire to expand, sometimes to contract. I always wish to be unique and also one with the world.”
See more of Ardea’s work here: www.ardearts.com
