In Khan Gallery
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James M. Lane
- Additional Information -
In Khan Gallery is pleased to annouce Intragrams , an exhibition of chromogenic print photography by contemporary Greek artist James M. Lane. The opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, January 30, from 6-8 pm.
Mr. Lane's photographs employ a combination of muted emotion and mutated physicality. The choice of color reflects the 'memory' of the womb; a submersion into that inner sanctum where everything is beginning and has begun. This subdued shift in bluish/bruise-like color is emotionally intriguing against the chosen sharp-white areas. Emotions like uneasiness and the beginning of melancholia, share the same body and moment with passive reflection and comfort: the being is awake and asleep. Intragrams, the title for this series of works, so aptly describes this state: the push - pull, of memory and messages, within the body and from the being.
Mr. Lane resides in Athens, Greece. He was born in 1969 to an American father and Greek mother, both of whom are painters. He studied at Parsons School of Design/New School For Social Research in New York City and received a BFA in photography in 1992. James has had numerous exhibitions in Greece as well as New York, and is included in notable collections such as the Dakis Joanou-Deste Foundation, 3E Ltd.,Athens, and the Ioanidis Collection, Athens.
Catalog is available.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
We know that a song can convey truth regardless of its words, just as an ideogram can be independent of its meaning. We can assume there is a point where the boundaries of specificity get dissolved; a "threshold to the infinite". Perhaps it is the point when a conductor raises his arms just before we hear the music; a stage between motion and stillness, existence and non-existence; a backstage where Hamlet could certainly play "King of Infinite Space" and beyond Plato's dark theater, towards the light of non-duality.
Similarly, between the darkness of the camera and the light that floods it to form an image, there's a timeless point, a potential for transformation, that resembles the void between night and day (when the two, minutes before dawn, are inseparable). Photography is only another vehicle addressing that void. Plenty of questions spring from it; storming like Shakespearean "bad dreams".
How can photography break the boundaries of specificity when detail and description make up the backbone of this media? Can we use a camera to merely slice time in the form of images or can we go further? Does "further" mean far enough to delude our sense of time or far enough to see beyond real time?
Seven years ago, I turned my lens towards animals, looking for answers. I focused on their behavior, trying to depict the process by which these creatures could redirect their senses inward at any given time. Whether facing their own death or a new life, they appeared to be at ease with themselves. No protest for or against existence. They seemed to experience those "thresholds to the infinite", and attended to the void between night and day in which nature always appeared withdrawn, almost haunted. The silence of nature pointed the way to a river that interconnects all things.
In my current work, I explore issues that had an impact on me during my work with animals. This time, I depict our own species in a way that defies questions rather than a way of articulating answers. That lurking void, pregnant like an encoded telegram, a cryptogram, a silent potential, seems to reveal itself when we stop searching, when we turn within; looking for an intramural perspective rather than an exterior point of view. Turning within also means turning away from the crusade for the ephemeral in its multitude of forms. Our concept of time ceases to stop at our expiration date. Accepting our death means seeing beyond real time which allows us to experience our spiritual connection to nature.
Unity of individual and universe was perhaps effortlessly celebrated in infancy; the archetypal playground of non-duality. "Thresholds to the Infinite" are like windows to our infancy. They prepare us for the point when our bodies will poise, weightless like ripe fruits, between the pull of the earth and the bond to the sky.
----James M. Lane, 1997
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