[MUSINGS]
GRACE ROSELLI and KEN WILBER'S POST-MODERN REVELATION Musings By DARIA DESHUK
I
From the album “New Work ’09” by Grace Roselli. “This is an older painting, based on a collage on same image.” The setting is the collector’s house.
NOUR 51” x 39” mixed media/ paper
was fascinated to see the recent artwork of Grace Roselli, renewing a friendship via Facebook. I was struck by the street culture and mark-making she used in the drawings, spray paint, collage and mixed media, which inspired me in my own art work and led me to question the relationship of subject matter, culture and world view. These images are reminiscent of what I know of the artist from time spent living on the fabled lower East Side of Manhattan with its accompanying explosive street life. It was, and remains, a fantastical environment where graffiti art was everywhere. I understood Grace’s depictions of women in her art, and acknowledgement of female empowerment movements of the time. I too was a part of this energy. Remember the power suit, the birth of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective awakening of the goddess, and the pop idol Madonna? Yet my questioning continued. There was, I ascertained, more going on than the merely contemporary view. There was something that felt foreign and mystical, not of my world or the streets of NYC alone. As I started reading A Brief History Of Everything (A description of the path of human development-the evolution of consciousness) by Ken Wilber (Shambhala), my mind expanded to understand both Grace’s artwork and Ken’s writing on integral life principles and how they worked in tandem in the realm of Post -modern theory in art and its need to address evolution of consciousness to create art that transcends, presenting new images and visions. As the author states, “The ‘subject’ (artist) is situated in its own contexts and currents of its own development, its own history, its own evolution. The pictures it makes of the world depend in a large measure not so much on ‘the
MONA LISA WANTS 96” x 60” mixed media/ canvas
world’ as on this ‘history.’ ” In his chapter The Great Post Modern Revolution, he continues, “As the cosmos comes to know itself, more fully different worlds emerge. This revolution in human understanding and ‘new paradigm’ approaches to knowledge is that different world views create different worlds; they aren’t just the same world seen differently.” Soon after Grace posted her recent paintings on Facebook, she also posted photos that were fascinating and definitely not from my world or the New York City environment which she and I both knew so well. In her album Mabrook Ramadan, Grace’s images show the artist and her daughters riding camels, her children’s aunt in a head scarf, a women in a hijab is in the background of a photo of her daughter. A portrait of a woman with Henna hands, of a grandmother holding her daughter, of an aunt in a wedding dress too heavy for the bride to walk in, so she is carried on a tray. By posting and sharing these photos of her relationship to family and life in Morocco and notes on its culture, we are given information to
reference Grace’s art in which she creates work that is mingled with self, family, culture and views of women unique to her. Creating a work of art layered in this meaning, Grace goes beyond the representation paradigm “mirror of nature” which fails to take into account the self that is creating and embeds her work with personal and subjective meaning. This results in new and interesting images with multi-levels of culture. I now understood Wilber’s thesis about consciousness creating new world-views and how this was very present in her art. “So the great post-modern discovery was that neither the self nor the world is simply pre-given, but rather they exist in contexts and backgrounds that have a history and development,” he maintains. W hen we understand evolution of consciousness in the Post-modern mind, through the quadrants of I (inner-space, emotions, thoughts, individual interior and insight); WE (shared meaning, relationships, mutual understanding of collective interior); IT (culture, time, place); and ITS (world views, cosmos), our world view is informed at a deeper level and new perspectives are born. Art that creates new imagery and content asks us to go deeply into the artist’s views and subsequently develop new and unique understandings of the artwork, the artist and the world, possibly even ourselves. “The world view is the mind, the base is the body of spirit. These body-minds evolve, and bring forth new worlds in the process, as spirit unfolds its own potential, a radiant flower in the Cosmos springs forth, in not so much the big bang as the big bloom. And at this stage of development the world looks different because the world is different…” — and there is the great post-modern revelation, from A Brief History Of Everything by Ken Wilber. Fine Art Magazine • Winter 2009 • 55