Overall Winner Photographic Art - Arte Laguna Prize 2013
Unframed / Giclee Hahnemühle Baryta / embossed stamp / Certificate of authenticity
Edition of 12 (Artist Proofs available)
includes 50mm borders.
“All of a sudden there was a dazzling light and in the centre of that bright whirlpool was a core of blinding light that flashed down from the depths of the sky with terrifying speed until suddenly it stopped, motionless and sacred...The sparkling features of the being wore an expression of supernatural beauty and grief.” – St Francis receives the Stigmata, from Brother Leo’s account, circa 1224.
‘Boys in a City Park’ was developed during a personal enquiry into the concept of fracture and healing on a residency in the Donbas region of Ukraine, supported by the Izolyatsia Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, mentored by Boris Mikhailov.
This image as part of a major body of work explores fracture and healing beyond the physical as metaphor; an inevitable damage in the process of engaging with the world universally shared but uniquely experienced.
This project in its literal sense, highlights how misunderstood and repressed the condition of autism is as a hyper sensitivity to the world and form of otherness. Boys in a City Park celebrates the stigmatized as any deviation from the normative and all life that does not fit into the narrow confines of socially accepted identity. The works, of which this is one, throw further light on the Ansett's unique relationship to society and reality (see biography).
Allegorically this work essentially moves beyond the reality narrative and brings these lives and landscape into a broader moral, spiritual and political dialectic on the nature of human existential suffering, presenting it, in traditional art historical terms, as the essential beauty of the human experience.
“Trauma does not always bear obvious markers – it is a complex phenomenon, which should not be perceived simply in terms of a dysfunction to be ashamed of and shunned. Fragility and trauma are inextricably linked – the former reflects human spirit sensitively attuned to reality, while the latter is both the essential price and reward. While accompanied by pain and hardship, trauma is a powerful agent for growth and a more intricate understanding of our condition as individual beings and beings in society.” – Response from Izolyatsia director and curator Victoria Ivanova
