A Separate Reality An eclectic exhibition of realistic visual artworks curated by Samantha Mae Dorfman artists: Thomas Andersen - Aileen Bassis - Allen Maertz - Jennifer Mazza Douglas Newton - Leah Oates - Roger Sayre - Charlotte Schulz Rebecca Sittler - Brian St. Cyr - Randall J. Stoltzfus CLICK HERE FOR IMAGES OF ARTIST'S WORKS CLICK HERE FOR ARTIST'S BIOS What is the difference between "looking" and "seeing"? The idea of the exhibition called "A Separate Reality" originates from the book by Carlos Castaneda about his introduction to a different concept of reality by a sorcerer or medicine man named don Juan who was a Yaqui Indian living in Mexico. "You think about yourself too much and that gives you a strange fatigue that makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments. A light and amenable disposition is needed in order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge I am teaching you. Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid." From "A Separate Reality" By Carlos Castaneda Don Juan presented Carlos Castaneda with Zen-like koans to break apart the conceptualized idea of reality to create a new way to comprehend the world. Whether the book is factual or not isn’t the significant issue in relationship to the selected artworks for this exhibition. The idea that artists create their own reality was the point of departure for this collection of works. In pluralistic times, the individual artist selects the important realities from the world by "looking" and synthesizes these pictures into a work of art by "seeing" through the filter of their individual consciousness. In this case, the artist becomes the creator of their own personality reality and expresses their reality through their work. These "realities" differ from artist to artist. Some artists choose to depict emotional or psychological experiences such as alienation, longing, or anger while others try to comprehend physical realities of the body, war, nature, immigration, social issues, fantasy, and so on. The main component is the artist as witness sharing his or her reality with the viewer. Each work portrays the personal and public ideology of the individual artist in varying degrees of realistic representation. This depiction is somehow skewed, enhanced, or magnified in order to convey an added intent or subtext. In a vast world, the artist’s role has become selector of imagery. The viewer must ask why would the selected images be used and what is the underlying message. The concept becomes the over-riding key to discovery in a time when the artist is free to use any image they desire. Works from "A Separate Reality" can be used to discover the innate collective consciousness of our time. It’s interesting to note the dialogue between the works, themselves, and the artists’ internal dialectic with art history and culture. A free form spirituality and fantasy life co-exist with formal considerations of chosen technique, historical or personal reference, and social message. Comparing and contrasting the images offered creates a multi-dimensional view of our world encompassing rational thought with spirituality, emotionality, surrealism, philosophical, political, and social concerns. This view gives rise to the quantum idea of many realities co-existing as opposed to a dogmatic view of the world. This exhibition is an eclectic choice of works whose unifying thread is a concept of realism. This realistic view is based on the juxtaposition of personal and public, emotional and theoretical, social and political. These external and internal truths combine to make up our own "separate realities". In a time where one cannot distinguish between the realities presented by the media or one’s own logical conclusions about the nature of existence, the artists present their own truths about the world around them. This truth includes humor, mysticism, history, fear, surrealism, beauty, social concerns, revulsion, reminiscence, political issues, and the simulation of experience. As curator, I choose not to separate the personal from the political. I choose to position a frame of reference in relation to the created objects and images the artists present encompassing the multitude of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality except their own.