Ardea Thurston-Shaine

A small colorful bird stops moving and I can see it clearly for an instant. Sudden insight comes when I am falling asleep and step over into the inner space of a dream. I explore the character of boundaries: between sensory experience and emotion, between waking thought and dreams. The fugitive moments of clarity (the perched bird, the insight in dream) are essential to the boundaries themselves. I paint multiple spaces that occupy one space, interlocking. The natural landscape symbolizes the experienced world, with the bird, when it appears, acting as a spokesman for the outside. The birds perch on that boundary line, looking in on the space of the viewer and entering the inner spaces in other layers of the image. The human figures speak to what is felt from the inside, symbolizing levels of emotional balance through physical posture. They are broken apart and obscured by the observed world, just as our feelings are entangled in the overwhelming forces of our experience. Due to the overlapping layers of imagery in my work, shapes only occasionally solidify into objects. In this way, I mimic the chaotic fluidity of experience, while paying homage to moments of brief recognition.