Octet: Selected Works from the School of Visual Arts, New York

Narrative Imperatives
From Aesop to Gilgamesh, to Shakespeare, everyone loves a gripping story.  Morality tales, fairy tales, tales of adventure or encounters of the third kind, stories are retold over time, and handed down as inherited wisdom.  Stories underscore the foibles and fantasies within the human psyche and also recount the endless desires for romance, adventure and revenge.

The Corporeal and Divine
From vanitas to chakras, to meditative practices and calls to prayer, adherence to the sacred resonates through civilizations. Beliefs concerning the spirit and the soul, heaven and hell, the now and the afterlife, share a penetrating resonance with art, philosophy and theology.
The reality of life’s decomposing flesh is often counteracted by an attempt to reach a state of grace willing to accept such temporal manifestations. Religion, myth and the spiritual in art narrate concerns over ethical dilemmas, in addition to soothing beliefs in everlasting time.

World Dramas
Power and politics shape each age, and the current time has become quite contentious, to say the least. With the decline of the concept of the nation-state and the eruption of alternative governments, new models of tactical war and peace populate the global landscape. From the requisite desire for ecological stewardship, to geo-political territorial tensions, from economic meltdowns to challenging peace plans, from historical mishaps to nuclear testing, what kinds of political pressures weigh upon citizens of the world?