Monday, May 5, 2008

Norman's Statement

Blue. Red. Green. Three colors we are all familiar with. Not only are we familiar with them but also we are familiar with what they may represent:
Blue – The sky, the sea, sadness, coldness.
Red – Fire, blood, warmth, passion.
Green – Nature, money, envy, hope.
Instead of these meaning these colors were primarily the symbols of the three political parties back home in Puerto Rico. For me this combination of the colors simply represented politics. What I find fascinating about this is that as our experiences determine how we interpret objects their meaning is transformed depending on who is observing.
My art then is an attempt to understanding situations with multiple meaning behind an object, image or idea. One of my artworks that dealt with this was the video Path to Enlightenment. I was inspired to work on this piece when I started to learn about Buddhist artwork and architecture. I learned that although the objects or images used might seem simple in form they could be interpreted in many number of ways. One of the structures that exemplified this was the Stupa, which was a building used as a reliquary for the purpose of preserving relics so that a practitioner could visit the structure and be spiritually enlightened by it. This video was my attempt at trying to show in a different form (computer animation) the depth of meaning that could be read by observing one of these structures. One of the ways of interpreting a stupa is by looking at what each of the levels of the structure represents. The video used a combination of computer animations and still images to express the meaning of these symbols.
I want my artwork to show how a single object can have meanings that we cannot grasp at first glance. I want it to show that when it comes sown to the images we see, their meaning goes beyond what we can interpret from our own experiences. I want to let people grasp what they take no notice of.