FAR Bazaar - One Year Ago: Ubuntu ("I am what I am because of who we all are." Boyd Varty)

Ubuntu Installation 2018 #1

 

A Statement For The 2017 FAR Bazaar Installation at Cerritos College 

    A Career, with a capital C, is often THE singular experience in life we let define us! It begins as a child when we’re asked, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”. It continues as an adult when we meet someone for the first time and queried, “What do you do?”.

    I have taught at Cerritos College for almost three decades, nearly half my life, and on more than one occasion have let my career define me. The space that contains this installation, which is set for demolition soon, was my former office and have a more personal and intimate relationship to it. So, rather than leave it a boxy room of limits and constraints, I have endeavored to create a space that can become an opening, a potentiality for limitless possibilities, even if it’s for only two days.

    In my twenty-five unique plastic figurines, ‘Box of Buddhas,’ five wooden boxes and gift bag template with redacted religious text, there is no one "self-portrait" that can be identified as “me.” That which we call the “self” is a mental construct all of us create that tends to be all-encompassing. It comes from not only our immediate notion of what we perceive as our self, both physical and mental but also abstractions of everything we experience, which include both what I think of as myself and what I think of as “other.” It is something that is ongoing and undergoes constant change throughout our life. We believe that it designates something that is real and exists, but there is nothing that exists that corresponds to our notion of self; it is only an idea. It is this “self” that provides us a complete and seamless, albeit distorted, interpretation of our reality.

 

Ubuntu Installation 2018 #2