Leonora Carrington at Di Donna Galleries, NYC

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Whether we look to the contradictory functions that people are asked to fulfill today – devoted parent and loyal employee, faithful spouse and emancipated libertine, mature adult and eternal child – or to the ways in which identities are disbursed across divergent political forums, information systems, and communication networks, the same observation holds:  we are infinitely divided.  What is called an individual today is an abstract assemblage of fragments.  Phone calls, emails, voice mails, blogs, videos and photos, surveillance tapes, banking records:  the body is dwarfed by the virtual tendrils that shoot out if it through time and space, any of which is likely to claim to be the real “you” as you are.  Only the imaginal mind can lead us out of the maze, with art providing the symbols that mark the way to the elusive essence that truly defines us.

J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice:A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action

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