David Gorley: Shadow
February 3-25, 2023
David Gorley: Shadow
Opening reception: Friday, February 3, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM, and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM.
After a hiatus from showing works, 2020, and the pandemic taught me the need to show the works I constantly have made over the past years, to voice my statement through sharing. I am a local area artist from Upper East Tennessee and my works are biographical in nature, of myself, but also culturally through the visual language of the sites of our area. These works were created with a Diana camera, a plastic toy, I picked up over 20 years ago. As a tool, the visual phenomena created by its analog nature allow shadows to creep in, sunlight to burst forth and scenes to take on a blurred, dreamlike state. I frame my vignettes with my a nod to my precious influencers and mentors like Nancy Rexroth, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Robert Frank and Walker Evans.
Statement:
These works surround ideas of consciousness vs the subconscious, the archetypes built into a collective or cultural memory. I do not mean them as nostalgic, though that inevitably comes to mind. They are dreamlike, blurred, off, somewhat like that nagging memory, that feeling from the past that can’t quite be caught. I view the banal, the everyday. A fleeting sight of a tree. An old house looms up. Someone has just left a room. A glance at a flower while on a quick drive by. Crouching, hiding, action has taken place just outside the frame. An empty chair is in a yard. quilt flaps on a clothesline. These visual elements and colors stand as symbols to evoke that hero’s journey built into all of us, to make us examine our presence, here and now, or past or future.
I’m reminded of something Carl Jung wrote in his 1961 book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in the last chapter called “On Life After Death:”
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short- sightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
1961 Pantheon-Random House, New York, page 326.