Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1181922
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 NOVEMBER 2019 5 THIS WEEK ART the silver river cal. I've been painting for the sake to experiment with some ideas. Trying to understand what I'm looking for before I return to sculpture and other media. The paintings forming part of 'Silver River' appear to be exploring themes which are both philosophical, and also indicative of states akin to shamanic journeying... could you speak a bit about how the process of creating visual art is tied, for you, with these cognitive and visual processes? I'm interested in exploring these states because I want to see what content the mind pro- vides one with, that part which in a normal state one cannot reach. I'm interested in looking into the subtler conditions of the mind and existence. I'm cu- rious about the finer qualities of being. I believe that all the gods and energies are within, and I would like to meet them first- hand. But the real research is to look into the depths of egoless- ness, when one reaches a pure state of awareness. As such, Silver River is a col- lection of works on paper, ex- ploring different states of con- sciousness, investigating the type of conditions, settings and circumstances that produce dif- ferent forms of refined and al- tered states of awareness, alert- ness or raptness where time seemingly falters, and space dilates. Such states provide ex- perience with a different altered sense of how we usually define or understand personhood. With this work, and the re- search that goes into it, I set out to explore the fundamen- tal conditions that create these states, the object and content of internal/external perception, and the cognitive apparatus of one's awareness, or core self. Extra-ordinary states of con- sciousness affect subjective time and space. In such situations time, space and the awareness of oneself as a river of con- sciousness, are experienced di- versely as types of felt time. In the event of meditation, active immersion, deep sleep, moments of terror and tran- sient loss of oneself, perception engages differently in self-re- flection and the world. There- fore, an alteration to the regular awareness of the internal con- scious experience of time and space becomes apparent. This, for example, can happen in a rather simple and immediate manner when one's awareness becomes absorbed in any of na- ture's phenomena, momentarily forgetting oneself as mental and emotional experience merges in the sublime. Each work portrays different types of circumstances and phenomena wherein such states are experienced. What do you make of the local visual arts scene? What would you change about it? I don't really know how to answer this question, since I'm kinda floating in and out… Silver River will be on display at Lily Agius Gallery, Ca- thedral Street, Sliema until November 16 "I realised that it's unhealthy to keep practising and producing works that address my inner anxieties, because that would make anxiety the main reason for producing work"