VIVI-MARIS KONST PÅ KEN WILBERS INTEGRALLIFE.COM: FROM DIALECTICS TO INTEGRATION

FROM DIALECTICS TO INTEGRATION

"While images express perceived reality in a most delightfully nuanced way that leaves room for individual interpretation, symbols tell a story in a more accurate way. It's in the combination of these that I have found my most potent form of self-expression. As I started to see that life is truly paradoxical, the idea of dualism and the equality of the two sides of a story crept into my artwork. Chronic illness and various other personal issues that needed to be solved gave rise to the expression of loss and despair, but these are always teamed with hope and faith that Spirit knows the way forward. Struggle and tension is thus resolved in higher understanding and a letting go of pretensions. It's a dialectic process, a seemingly never-ending roller coaster with endlessly varied viewpoints on my own development and relationship with the rest of the universe. Pride and humility are ingredients that need to be tried and tested during the journey. Theoretical knowledge is a good thing to carry in one's rucksack, but ultimately life has to be lived and emotions must fully develop for the experience to be complete. Who said it would be easy? While surrender to joy and experiences of pure consciousness are wonderful, it's in the encounter of darkness and in the uncovering of the shadow that life is often at its most interesting. By expressing this dualistic process as I know it in a visual form, I hope to help support greater acceptance of all that is painful in this reality, for everybody. This I wish to do without losing sight of the 'other' reality, the one that we all know in the depths of our hearts." (Vivi-Mari 2011)

Jag hade äran att bli vald som en av de konstnärer som får representera Ken Wilbers integrala filosofi på www.integrallife.com. Min presentation heter "From Dialectics to Integration". Under 1990-talet läste jag allt Wilber skrev och kände djup samhörighet med den andliga livsinställningen. Han talar inte bara om medvetandets utveckling och de olika stadier människan individuellt och kollektivt går igenom, utan också om den jungianska tanken om Skuggan. Skuggan är kort uttryckt det vi har samlat på oss i vårt undermedvetna. Läs mer i min essä "Do You Have To Suffer For Art". Jag har haft ett stökigt liv de senaste tio åren och har inte orkat engagera mig så mycket i Wilbers nyaste teorier, men har märkt att konsten har börjat bäras fram som en viktig del av mänsklighetens utveckling.

Michael Schwartz skrev en mini essä om min konst:

The Times of Memory

Collage—an art technique which blossomed during the twentieth-century—displays on a two dimensional surface images and texts from various sources, constructing these into a complex and dynamic whole, the component images retaining their own independence as recognizably distinct in style and origin.

Vivi-Mari Carpelan's contemporary collages are profoundly noteworthy. In their enactment of deep symbolic logics, they do nothing less than re-configure time.

Some of the source imagery comes from Hindu art, evoking an ancient and ongoing tradition. Other imagery originates in advertisements from past decades, evincing a nostalgia where loss can never quite be recovered or redeemed. Still other imagery comes from prints of Neo-Classical architecture, a building style that resurrects the antique past in producing stone monuments that defy the ravages of time. More haunting and playful are skeletal images of extinct species, tokens of the arising and perishing of all particular life forms within a vast and mysterious evolutionary unfolding. The esoteric and alchemical diagrams dispersed throughout key an anticipatory time proper to secreted promises yet to be revealed.

The space of these collages is thus the arena of a profound mode of Memory (an inflection of Consciousness itself)—a Memory that is prior to any given form or feel of time, and which accommodates all such forms, allowing them to reverberate with each other through the part/whole dynamic of the collage construction. This is an Art of Memory that is not simply retrospective and receptive, but powerfully and profoundly Creative: the interplay of the imagery sparking novel senses of time—transforming the Self-sense so tenderly and vulnerably at stake in these works.

Michael Schwartz
April 2011

Konstverk: "Så länge det finns hopp finns det liv", copyright 2008


Läs mer om integral teori:
Finland (på finska, med inlägg om min konst)
Sverige (på svenska)
Ken Wilbers hemsida (engelska)