RESUME | EXHIBITIONS

Take a leap and return to the warm nothingness of potential to find what you may become as the shifting reality of transformation takes place. The Velvet Void denotes a place where things are hidden, secret - where the potential for transformation exists, a sweat lodge, a confessional box, a woman’s womb, and the cocoon where a butterfly will emerge. The dance therein is a myriad of shifting realities and multiple existences; if we surrender to the unknown, what we might become may be as surprising in its realization as the dance of transformation is in unexpressed potential.

The place where metaphysical transformation occurs cannot be defined, it exists only briefly and then is replaced by the changed self. This moment in time in its minuteness is where the greatest potential exists. It is shaping and forming. What experiences have lead to this moment are past and what will become is approaching, yet what is this indefinable space? The present the here and now is passed even as we try to express our experience of it. Yet that space of exact change must exist somewhere.

When we try to define the reality of the moment, on a quantum level, we are drawn deeper into the void of ever expanding mystery. We may find this realization startling. It upsets the balance of what we have come to accept as truth. The second we try to define our world and our experience as human beings, a shift occurs and nothing is quite as we perceived it before. The light is both particle and a wave, an electron exists in a space that we cannot distinguish but we may only view the path it has taken. One thing can exist simultaneously in two places. Though that seems impossible and our brains wrestle with the implications of such an observation, it can be seen as freeing if we allow it by accepting that reality is what we make of it. The world exists as our creation and there is limitless potential in that realization.

My work for this exhibition is both narrative and visual examination. My role as artist is to be a conduit for the observers to tell a story that is unfolding before them and by this act illicit a change in perception and experience. Through my visual images others might construct a universe of meaning or they might categorize and classify – the observer is the god in this scenario. My act of transformative creation no longer exists, the moment has shifted and become the past, this work is the only tangible evidence that such a journey has taken place.

Mary Yates
September 2005