AQAL Views
Urban waterscapes from United States
Urbanisation trends show the majority of the world’s population living in major urban areas, making the city our ultimate home. Living in a city is an art and we need the vocabulary of art to describe the peculiar relation between humans and the material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, that the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics.
‘AQAL Views’ is a series of urban waterscapes; blurred waterscapes and moving skies meet building silhouettes and auxiliary structures in a merging dance between the perpetual and the ephemeral. In the integral lexicon, ‘AQAL’ means an “all quadrant, all level matrix of reality”, and points to the cross-cultural fact that all humans have 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person perspectives, and that all humans wake, dream, and sleep. We all live in “AQAL space” and such is our viewing.
Having lived most of my life near the water, a deep connection with this element has been formed. Scenes that combine landscapes with waterscapes are dear to my heart in a primal level, which also explains my attraction to the minimalist long exposure imagery of photographers like Michael Kenna, David Burdeny, and the plethora of other artists that comprise this expanding fine art genre following the lineage of Pictorialism. Arriving in places, the new and unfamiliar instinctively is counterbalanced by the familiarity of the waterfront. When we put aside all the analyses and pause from all the search, we find what they refer in Zen as “the beginner’s mind”, a fresh look as if we just witnessed the wonders of this world. When all is said and done, comes a peaceful feeling of completion and the shear joy of being. When we momentarily drop all we know and the anxiety of the unknown, we can rest in “one taste”, in the unifying consciousness that all are one.
Images are part of a larger project: ‘Integral Lens - multi perspectival approaches to the study and representation of the built environment’. A visual journey of contemporary architecture and cityscapes from United States taken during a 5-month visit. 9,600 miles were traveled by plane, 4,200 miles by car, 1,300 miles by public commuting, and 750,000 steps walking. The project was awarded by the Fulbright Foundation with the Artist Scholarship Award and sponsored by the College of Architecture and Design of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Selected images from this project have received distinctions in international photography competitions like Fine Art Photography Awards, PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, Spider Black & White Awards, International Photography Awards.
Book selection: http://www.blurb.com/b/7103787-integral-lens-vol-1
