I am Free! And Excerpts from the lecture.

"I understand the spiritual as a way of living in the ordinary while sensing the extraordinary."-Lucy Lippard

Myself in front of the San Juan Community Theatre in Friday Harbor. (Cell phone photo by Nina Le Baron)

The lecture inside the San Juan community Theatre in Friday Harbor (Cell phone photo by Nina Le Baron)

Pam Nichols, of the VAM, myself, and Nina Le Baron, of the IMA/WBI (Cell Phone photo by Danielle Dean Palmer)

A few excerpts from the lecture,  "Consciousness, Spirituality, and Intellect: Creating Dialogue Through Art" on Friday Harbor

The first known allegorical photographic portrait was Hippolyte Bayard’s, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man. It was created by Bayard- in part-as a protest to the fact that he was not given proper credit for his role in the development of photography. Bayard’s image is the first “art” photograph to blend emotion with consciousness, while presenting an allegory of the self.

Hippolyte Bayard, Self-Portraits as a Drowned Man, 1840

John Szarkowski writes," that since 1960, there has fundamentally been two traditions in art photography. He describes these as mirrors and windows, with the romantic (Minor White for example) representing mirrors, and the realist, Linda Connor, for example, windows. Szarkowski proceeds to explain mirrors (the romantic) as dependent on his or her understanding, but are meaningful in terms of anthropocentric metaphors we assign them. Realists (or windows) “contain discernable patterns of meaning, forming models of symbols.” Mirrors tell us about the artist, windows about the world.”

Minor White, Snow on Garage Door, Rochester, NY, 1960

Image from the Lick Observatory, Printed from an original glass negative by Linda Connor

In the exhibition catalog, Searchlight at the Millennium, 1999, Lawrence Rider writes in the introduction: “that it is his belief that art possesses a unique capacity to embody consciousness, and thereby heighten viewers awareness of his or consciousness.” He later goes on to note that scholars agree on 9 main aspects of consciousness which include:

Awareness

Attention/focus

Qualia (character of experience-red of red)

Unity

Memory

First person perspective-experience of person experiencing

Self-awareness

Conceptual framing and metaphor

Empathy

"On one hand, these image (my photographs) present a partial view of our bioregion. A bioregion is defined “as a unique overall pattern of natural characteristics that are in a specific place.” On the other hand, they represent "home" and symbolize place."

"My fundamental interest is in nature and culture by focusing on place. Place can mean different things to different people. The best definition that I have come across is from Lucy Lippard’s book The Lure of the Local. She writes: " A lived-in landscape becomes a place, which implies intimacy; a once lived in landscape can be a place, if explored, or remain a landscape, if simply observed."

" I am interested in the connections, conflicts, and intersections of nature and culture, and how culture has both enhanced and detracted from my own relationship, to among other things, nature."