about this show...
This series represents another phase in a developing art essay on New Mexico that began in 2005 with my first visit there. So much can be said about New Mexico. Its rare cultural plurality has profound relevance as we approach the deepest point in a process of global cultural homogenization that began five hundred years ago with the European incursions into Africa and the Americas. On the human psychological level mass cultural extinctions are equivalent in consequence to the mass extinction of species and loss of diversity within the biosphere though all the more dangerous to us because its consequences are completely unrecognized. As a species we are at least dimly aware that the loss of diversity within the biosphere may be harmful to us, but not so when it comes to the loss of diversity in human culture. On the contrary, we are falsely comforted by a mistaken belief that the accelerated transmission of the dominant culture's materialistic philosophy and values throughout the world via communications technology is a good thing. As the process of cultural homogenization deepens within our own country the cultural diversity that still characterizes New Mexico serves as a critical cultural reference point for those seeking ways to redress the balance within themselves and their communities.
The show is entitled "New Mexico, A Threshold Between Worlds" because not only is New Mexico a threshold between worlds, it is a threshold between no less than four worlds. Firstly it is a threshold between the spiritual world and the physical world, as are all high mountain desert environments, and secondly it is a point of intersection between the worlds of indigenous spirituality, Christianity and modernity. The order of the photos from top to bottom reflect this theme. The initial images suggest a unity of heaven and earth as seen from an indigenous perspective. The intermediate images reflect the popular Christian conception of death as a threshold between mortality and eternal life. The final images represent the modern world, its cerebral nature and the dissociation that results within the individual and his or her relationship to society symbolized by the final three images, "The Uninitiated", "Locked Out" and "Cops".
The imagery in this show is part of a fledgling attempt to begin to symbolize perhaps the single most important and controversial idea in metapsychology today, the idea that the rational mind is at irreconcilable odds with the human spirit and, by association, extermal reality which it mistakenly perceives as separate from itself. The deepening ecological crisis is a manifestation of this intrapsychic conflict.
Denise Marts
Redmond, Washington
2008
425-802-1945
© copyright 2008, Denise C. Marts, all rights reserved