Mountain Song
An installation displayed in November 2022 in the group exhibition “New Old World” at Yashar Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.
Artist Statement: Staring into the mountains of San Ysidro one is overwhelmed not only by the incomprehensible vastness but the infinite layers of ecological multiformity. The immediate reflex of modern man in this moment is to capture; extract, present and claim the image in front of him. And yet, this task becomes oddly a challenge, if not an impossibility. Perplexed by this realization, we try harder — we take more photographs, draw more lines, write more letters. But every time we go back and glance, nature seems to change; it is changing constantly. And thus, we will always feel the need to keep capturing, for there will always be more of the world to see and to claim. We think of colonization as man’s downfall, but in truth it is a drive so intimately a part of us, hard-wired into our biorhythms. Our fundamental essence as man is found in our unique response to a natural evolution that is out of our control. The irony is that, when we listen to nature, we cannot do so in a passive way. The challenge to define it is a call to participate in it, and the act of observing it, in turn, becomes an act of creating. In every glance, man can see a poetic reflection of his samsaric life, and simultaneously a projection of his own wonder, written in each intricate detail of the matter he perceives. It is an evolution of a living ecosystem happening in real-time that spans all the bounds of the historic Past and Future as we know them to be.
