MARI AMMAN, VERERI

THE SUBLIME GRACE OF UNDERSTANDING DIVINES TRUTH FROM MYTHOS.

The work developed from 2019 onward and is protected by international copyright laws.

Verērī (reverence), 2009 – 2023, film photography. The frames examine notions of inner and outer landscapes to invite quiet contemplation on the torsions within magnanimous notions of nature. Emergent light offers a coruscation of the transcendental spaces and polymorphic layers of perception in these frames. The continual act of looking upon, into, and through, the images offer impressions of landscapes with an opening for viewers’ imagination. Through the performative apparatus of photography, the sensation of reverence is evoked through emotional granularity. Existential questions reveal negative and positive spaces where light and shadow form and reform each other.

My personal aim in this work is the amelioration of life by looking closely at beauty as a means to heal suffering through understanding nature. The violence of ignorance brought about by thoughts lacking in understanding, I hope, can be transformed through the compassionate art of looking to understand nature, instead of impose an ideal upon nature. This seemingly nearly impossible task are repetitiously framed to make reminders of the deep ocean of inner peace accessible in looking. Photographs perform into minds through the imaginary realm, a sacred space I aim to responsibly work with. My personal ethos of the imaginary realm regards ways of seeing as a birthright and freedom to preserve and come to through choice. This is to say that things are not as we imagine them as ideology polemically posits, but as they are. The viewing process changes the viewer, whether or not viewers governs attention. In a technocratic time flooded with images, the curiosity to look with wonder to depoliticize bodies by making viewers agents of their own meaning. Through the psychologies of landscapes, notably written on by Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory, the images become residual impressions inviting viewers to experience nature free from the culturally apprehended use for tourism.

Nature has always served as my church. My secular view differs from religion because it is not a human believing itself can be saved or needs to save the world, but that Nature contains records with gaps and errors in understanding, consistently revealing themselves through patterns in the time we have here on earth, and with each other. 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.

The photographs visualise a spectrum of feeling through landscape forms. By attuning my senses to an ontological memory, I allowed my instinct to be guided to through forest scenes to depict the transformative dynamics of life. The visual metaphors coincided with histories I felt within my body. In a hypnogogic state, the elements within nature invited attention to the appearance of conflicts as vivid image impressions. Beauty and brutality, finite and unrelenting, pain and reprieve, memories are represented as chromatic windows to relentless changes in the ways life, seasons, and societies, grow and fall. The self-organizing quality of nature is brought into focus, inviting viewers to embrace plurality. The Vereri images developed into artistic research project: Aesthetic Resonances.

L’Œil de la Photographie featured a selection, March 2023. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com Virtual Reality videos by Aaron Alvic Schroeder