Pilgrimage: Bhutan - Statement
Pilgrimage: Bhutan
"In the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual."
From "The Origin of the Work of Art”
Heidegger, 1935-1936
My travels to the small and mysterious Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan broke down fixed narratives of landscape, time and place. While grounded in the material reality of Bhutan, the photographs aren’t about the kingdom per se, but rather explore and draw from the edge of my Western mind and Eastern Buddhist culture. They are landscapes of the experiences of place rather than landscapes of Bhutan itself. The frame, a core element in photography and psychoanalytic practice is both embraced and subverted. The camera’s viewfinder momentarily contains the continuous flow of the field. However, it also produced limiting frames that foreclose the forms and unthought-of thoughts that glimmer on the periphery. As I explore the limits of photographic composition and the frame of psychoanalytic practice, I am curious about what haunts outside the frame.