degarbara: August 2008

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Now an MFA graduate...

At this time of transition, my instincts are more certain than my belief...am I afraid of things? NO... Art has allowed me to see life as a means to look within myself, discover, and grapple with issues pertaining to professional ethics and practices. Having graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts, I have grown to become an individual, and a visual artist who has developed a critical eye and strong conceptual ability, and to whom the process of creating is constant and cathartic. My enthusiasm to live and breath art has been strengthened as a result of my conscience delving into undercurrents of subject, form, and content.
I shall continue to pursue experiences in physical environmental encounters, remain a romantic within the performantive state of mind, and explore the crossroads of idea and habit, calculation and probability, provoked observations, and worlds out of time. Although abstract and poetic, my work has been consistently committed to cultural identity and combine both strength and sensitivity that are imbued with a marked autobiographical significance; the way the self is divided between both inner experience and outer experience, as well as being divided by communal ties and individual longings.

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Syed Zaman

Artist Statement

Lost, Last

I wish I could turn it back and turn it around. Is it too late?

I can only sigh, relent, repent, look back, turn back.

There’s nothing. Just words of silence----

But silence does not exist for me, for its presence speaks to me----

Contradicts.

Conspires to unravel my soul and makes me give it my

Confessions.

There is no end to this story.

Its sounds struggle to move, to become movements like motions, sensations of sensations, moments within moments.

It inspires rain to become a crescendo----

One that permeates throughout the empty spaces in my body with desire of things past.

Then, there were these big, wide spaces in which I saw myself.

Now, in these spacious insinuations, I find myself----

Lost happily----

Shapes…lines enclosing.

Mama can you help me please?

I have answered questions that could not have been answered without the fear of becoming null, not being able to question.

These answers long to be a short story----

But short stories don’t exist for me.

Turning it around, but not turning it back, knowing that I can stay for as long as I want----

Leaving marks----

Physicalizing space with my body turns the passage of time into something tangible; something I could see, hear, and feel; something within which all elements, the body moving, the breath holding the body, audience interaction, and the personal relationship I possess with my materials are in communion with each other.

In my work, I get an impulse to gather both inner and outer experience, delve into the personal and grapple with undercurrents of sadness and longing, release feelings that have accumulated over a long period of time in order to understand the overwhelming flood of feelings that continuously courses through my body, and at the same time, captures the full trajectory of the human potential of movement.

I undergo familiar raptures, misery, and an inherent complexity. My life is then witnessed as the compression and expansion of human activity by mere strangers in a confined and multilayered space I create by turning the eye both inward and outward; in which I explore the value of emotions by allowing the “eye” and “I” to become identical and ascend to the unknown, reside in it, and fall from it.