MARIA LEWIS - ART CATALOG 2009
Below excerpts written about Gateless Gate #46
SHAPING SPACE the 3rd edition
published by Wadsworth Books 2007
( excerpt from page 33 of Shaping Space third edition 2007)
Titles may also play a significant role in the artist’s development of the piece as well as in viewers’ discovery of its meaning. If Maria Lewis’s minimalist conceptual piece shown in Figure 1.45 (note: Figure 1.45 is above image) were listed simply as Untitled, we could identify its design elements - the way light turns the stitching holes into a line of bright spots, the gentle curvature of the paper band, the color changes where attention to what the artist is trying to do. Even though the title is obscure, it starts to awaken some dim kind of awareness within us. The artist Maria Lewis helps us further with a brief explanation of her process in developing 49 paper works on the theme “Gateless Gate”.
( Artist Statement from page 33 Shaping Space third edition 2007 )
These forty-nine works are all inspired by Zen koans. These koans were written in the 12th century by the Zen master Ekai. A typical Zen master would say to his students about these koan stories: “If you like sweets and easy living, skip this; it is about being tremendously intent on Satori, ENLIGHTENMENT. It can happen to you. In a flashing moment something opens, you are new all through. You see the same unsame world with fresh eyes.” None of the stories make any pretense of logic. They are dealing with states of mind rather than words.
I contemplated for a while how to photograph these ephemeral works. My main focus was to express the joy of enlightenment through them. For me that meant they had to change, they needed to be one way and then present themselves in another. It was quite by accident that one day I held one up in the window, and then instantly felt they had a connection; they had become a window between heaven and earth. They could express on their own that tiny portal of spiritual space that is needed to move toward enlightenment.
Maria Lewis
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