Everywhere Is The Center Opening Reception  

Friday August 2nd, 7-9 pm Econo Jam Records.  
DJ Brian Lucas (Dire Wolves, Angel Archer).
Oakland First Fridays!  Food trucks and fun for all!

Prices and contact information here.    

 

Artist Statement

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this.

                    —Black Elk

Everywhere is the center of the world. The universal unconscious is the chant of nature.  It is the native speech of dreams—images, archetypes, forms within ourselves—shaped by the world and part of it.  Everyone is a part, nobody apart. 

I paint to discover the world, to see the world as it exists and to imagine it as it might exist.  I look and listen within and without, to what is possible and impossible, and follow where my imagination goes.  But my imagination, like everyone’s, is part of a collective imagination, an expanding universe of dreams, full of universal archetypes floating through the ages.  It is a language of symbols, as alive and flowing through the interconnected blood of the past, present and future, outside of time. Look closely at the kingdom within you and you will find it is the same as the kingdom everywhere. 

Poetry—linguistic rhythms encoded in the world—is everywhere and is read through the lens of imagination.  When we read these symbols, we read ourselves, where in the speech of dreams, we become timeless, simultaneous, beyond belief.  We are made of eternity: matter made of waves, stories made of symbols, retold again and again, a never-ending flow of interwoven meanings, inseparable from their sources. The images and rhythms of the collective unconscious are an eternally recurring symbolic language: a literature that extends beyond the possible, beyond imaginable.  I read the world through its poetry and its language of symbols. Everywhere is the center of the world.

Contact:     bstrang@sfsu.edu