Verērī (reverence), 2009 – 2023, film photography. Emergent light offers a coruscation of the transcendental space within existence. These existentialist visions invite viewers into multiple layers of looking. While appearing to be one thing, the continual act of looking reveals something else. Looking upon, looking into, and looking through, the images offer an opening for the viewers’ imagination. Through the performative apparatus of photography, the intense emotional granularity of life evokes a sensation of reverence. The afferent beauty in Time and Light perform as polymorphic layers of perception. The frames examine notions of inner and outer landscapes. Dramatic, playful formations invite quiet contemplation on the torsions within magnanimous notions of nature. Cosmogenic questions reveal the negative and positive spaces where light and shadow form and reform each other, where domination or acquiescence occurs.
My personal calling to nature was to serve as a church, differing from religion because it is not a human believing itself can be saved or needs to save the world, but that Nature contains a record with gaps and errors in understanding consistently revealing themselves through patterns in the time we have, to work with ourselves to resist and flow through the continuity of life.
Consciousness as the awareness and compassion of another imbues a responsibility to choice with a great weight. Forces such as those observed through the landscape are remembered as having been touched. Even if humans have not touched nature with memory, gravity grounds the realm of the conceptual, or ideal, through forces of human action.
By attempting to remove the “I” while working with a camera, an unselfing gives a space to connect through intention and instinct resulting in surprising images. The framing of what is there, seems to be the main bodily drive, where the machine of a camera becomes mental, visceral, visual, at the same time. The conceptual differences in the divided meaning of what Spirit is: psyche, personal, universal, eternal or bodied are what I hope these images can transcend.
These frames of acceptance are made to feel accessible as reminders to a deep ocean of peace within, found in looking. Photographs perform into minds through the imaginary realm, a sacred space to be responsibly entered into. My personal ethos is this imaginary realm is a birthright and freedom to come to through choice. In a time flooded by images, the curiosity to look is worked with, to depolicize bodies by making each viewer agents of their own meaning.
My personal aim in this work is the amelioration of life by looking closely at beauty as a means to heal manipulations, lies, tragedies and suffering through understanding. The violence of ignorance brought about by thoughts lacking in understanding, I hope, can be transformed through the compassionate art of looking.
L’Œil de la Photographie featured a selection, March 2023. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com Virtual Reality videos by Aaron Alvic Schroeder
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-Mari Amman, March 2023, Paris, France
Original artworks by Mari Amman. VR model created by Aaron Alvic Schroeder. Music of Julian Bream.
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SKJELL, SHELL, SJEL (SOUL), 2015, photography. Understanding the meaning of soul has confounded philosophers and theologians for centuries. In Norwegian language, skjell means shell, and sjel means soul. The mark between shell and soul is the letter form K. In this way,
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2015, Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway. Photographed in the autumn of 2015. Black and white film.
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Resplendence Cover
