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Tara Krause Visual Artist |
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Dancing the Alchemy of Kali_Lilith
All art is
political in the sense that the artist chooses each element of the image, and
the viewer in today’s visual culture chooses to read each element of the
image. Even in the most banal still
life, we find ourselves expressing and interpreting our own relationships to
self, family, community and planet. Whether
‘choice” is reflexive or deliberate, we are the authors of that perception
and expression. That said, I
choose as an artist to explore the interrelated themes of war, militarism,
women’s bodies, mothering and peace, having both lived and survived these
themes. I am interested in the
primal response. I seek to give voice to the dynamics of violence and beauty,
oppression and dignity, the strength of survival and the basta! moment
when individuals claim their human rights. I envision a human rights culture where the universal and
inalienable human rights of every woman, child and man are birthed into reality
in every stroke of my paintbrush and dimension of chiaroscuro, the play between
the shadows and illumination. I not only
choose that my art serve as an expression of cultural omertas, though at
times the screams are strangled still-borne in my throat; I seek to discover the
identity of my own path of artwork/motherwork, the synthesis of the creative and
the mothering. By dealing in these
realms, I want to explore the beauty of a woman’s mid life body at the ebb of
her fertility, on the cusp of menopause and the dynamics of sexuality and
creativity and women’s lived roles. Integral to
that, I treasure and struggle within the legacy of craft, of how that can feed
our artistic yearnings and expressions as we grapple with the frontiers of
knowledge, trends and events that are changing the facts of our quotidien life.
In dancing the alchemy of Kali-Lilith, I abandon myself to the process of the artist's heroic quest for authenticity and living an intentional life, and cast off the traditional heroine’s path of passivity, rescue and self-denial. Tara Krause New York
City, Fall 2001 |