Shelley Carlisle PhotoArt, Oakland, CA
Statement:
My work is born and created through personal catharsis and compassion. Based in Oakland, CA and attending graduate school at Mills College, the past two years of my life have been one of upheaval and transformation, thanks to the simultaneous life changes of a horrific divorce and the happy exploding of my art practice. My day-to-day life radically shifted from a full-time stepmom to student, photographer, artist, and musician. I have remembered and rekindled a powerful and authentic identity by combining my love and practice of these areas into my work.
In fragmented and fractured internal landscapes, I have found photography to be a stabilizing force. Abandoned by my biological mother when I was two, immersing myself in nature affords me the opportunity to reconnect with the Great Mother and the Sacred Feminine. When training for a solo July 2020 Grand Canyon rim to rim hike during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I rediscovered my love of photography and how immersively embracing and documenting my surroundings - the physical landscape and nature - heals these inner chasms. It is here I have recovered my inner feminist voice. Photography is the foundation to bring the inner to the outer, inspiring my audience to stand with me and share our stories of re-birth, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes.
Compiling this documentary style nature photography, archival and found imagery into my studio, I then investigate creating physical and digital collages from ritual hours of cutouts. This meditative process guides and informs the layering and formation of this work, chaperoned by intuition and feelings of compassion for my energetic universal linkage with everyone and everything. I shape the photos and collages into multi-dimensional sculptural and layered installations and animations, accompanied with reflective materials, projections and audio. Video and projection/mapping renders another unique perceptual lens and along with my original music, synthesizing compositions of meaningful stories and experiences. Rhythm, timing, temporality and somatic themes are important narratives throughout my work.
These conceptual ideas also blend with a deep connection to long-ago matrifocal societies such as the Goddess revering, nature oriented Minoan culture in ancient Greece. I utilize semiotics, archetypes and mythologies into my art to bridge these historic cultural energies and identities into the contemporary realm. My vision through these literal and metaphorical reflective works is to bring healing, power, self-knowing, regeneration and resurgence of the balance of the Divine Feminine.
