Portraits of an American Soul

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There are lies in disorder.
Yet everything united is not sin,
So how can we say we are alone
If we maintain a sense of dignity?
Practice yourself, acceptance,
And the shadow of doom will emerge, Reminding you of bygone ages
When the turmoil rose to greet your fragrant stasis. Love the glamour,
Love the grime.
You are a sublime indignity of arousal.

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Portraits of an American Soul is a series of eighteen oil pastel on gesso board drawings; each drawing is coupled with a poem I wrote out of my experience observing the drawings. Through image, each drawing reveals a unique soul quality. Through word, each poem reveals the interior experiences of the drawings in me. Together, image and word engage in a dialogue. This dialogue is an artistic representation of the human being. The image symbolizes our physicality; the word reconstitutes the image as an inner experience. When the viewer experiences the drawings and the poems together, they reveal themselves within each other as a dialogue of perception. Abstraction becomes living conception. Through this living conceptual reinterpretation of abstraction, the abstract is resurrected from the dogma of the cliche.

The world of today is full of abstractions. Especially in these tumultuous times of polarity, we have sought for abstractions in our endeavors to understand. In this process, however, we have fallen pray to the cliche. The abstracts’ complex meets us, but as we ourselves are not abstract, this confrontation fragments our individualities and our humanity. We have lost our true sense for ourselves. In light of this quagmire, my interest for this exhibition is that people feel invited into an exploration of nuance, mystery, complexity: something that cannot be named, but only discussed and known with openness, curiosity, humility, courage, and Love. My hope is that individuals walk away from this experience with a renewed sense of the complex livingness of our own inner constitutions. This exhibition is about perception, experience, dialogue, the self, the other self, the in-between, the uniting principle. Everything is a unity so long as we behave in it as one.

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I am hollow
Because you behold
In me the reluctance of truth.
And when I see you,
I feel afraid
To step into the ruse.
You tell me what I am here for, Sklittering the dawn.
You tell me with whom I have read,
The darkened words of robels.
Like the night,
I care for your safe return to meet me again. Simply be, and I, continued,
Will follow.
Fire, burn my soul to death.

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Artist Bio

~Lucien Dante Lazar

Lucien Dante Lazar (b. Chicago, IL, 1994) is an interdisciplinary artist whose praxis is founded in the intersections of art, science, and spirituality. He received his BA from Bard College (2016), his MFA from California College of the Arts (2020), and is currently working on his PhD in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation will concern the pedagogy of spiritual development through the diversity of the arts.