Ilyusha Mann’s Artist
statement
Art is
a means of entering the internal world of the artist as well as a means for the
artist to view their self. A body of work, then, shows the evolution of the
artist over time. This photo compilation is the story over the course of three
months of my own inner evolution, and thereby my evolving relationship to the
world around me.
The
project started out as just observing my environment and my friends. While
doing this, I was also very self-reflective, often contemplating death and the
importance of facing mortality. This is what led me to start taking pictures of
myself from my visual perspective, taking pictures mainly of my feet while I
look down doing whatever it is I do. This is relating myself to my surroundings
and seeing myself in them.
Over
time, the process of self-reflection became more abstracting, reconstructing
the way I viewed myself in relation to the world. At once I was only seeing a
shadow of myself in the world. Then I was realizing that the way I perceived
what was happening around me is a reflection of my own internal state, and that
state is far from the perfect compassion I hope to achieve.
Yet all this self-reflection wasn’t
doing anything to change that, so the story evolves again. It shifts to documenting
the Buddhist sangha, or community, I am a part of as well as recording acts of
compassion and honesty and how they affect people.
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