AMY SWARTELE

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Flux
1996

It’s what’s under the skin that intrigues me, not the public mask, but the private face. What is hidden or ignored, I perversely want to dig up, an archeology of the mind and senses and guts.

I like digging in the shadows, I’m a scavenger at heart. The beautiful in the grotesque, and the strange in the familiar have always seduced me. I like the in between spaces, that grey murky area of what does not easily fit in a predefined category. I enjoy the tension between opposites, intersection and reciprocal action, things that are neither / nor and both at the same time.

My imagery is focused on a merging of figure and ground, of shadow and reality, probable and possible, of illusion and paint. What I find most alluring is where things are in flux, difficult to grasp and hard to define. Breaking of boundaries is both literal and metaphorical.

It is easy to cling to a sense of permanence--about the natural world, other beings, and ourselves, as if these were each fixed, separate and distinct from the other.  But that is a delusion, for we are in intimate connection with our world as it continually transforms. We share our basic atomic and subatomic quantum components with both the animate and inanimate.  Our air and food, blood and bone, quarks charm and strange, have been part of something past and, with a single breath as well as with our death, will become part of something future.  In the life span of a skin cell, an individual, or in the evolution of a species, change and fluctuating identity are constant.  Our bodies change, our thoughts change, our feelings change.

My reality is a piece of theatre and I am its author and protagonist. This metaphor of 'theatre' allows me to approach my own inner reality.  I can explore the parade that my own psyche offers--absurdity, grotesquerie, a carnival of demons and freaks, which may frighten, fascinate, and seduce. 

RESUME

Ordeal by Water


Burst Egg

Wonderland