Artist Statement

Arcadia through the Looking Glass

by B. Lynch

I have been interested in the myths and stories of Western Civilization for the bulk of my artistic career. The opportunity to create an exhibit that explores this and to use my lecture forum to discuss the attachments that my artistic journey has with past art and how past art has its attachments with even older art is as tasty as the topic is chewy.

According to the dictionary, Arcadia is a place of rural contentment. But the real deal is that Arcadia is where Great God Pan is Lord, the home of nymphs and satyrs, where Dionysus, in goat form, is rent to fragments by his worshippers -- eaten and drunk raw. A land of wonders; it is the Golden Age of Greece. Being human encompasses contentment and fury. Learning that we are capable of both seems an essential task. How else can we harness these follies?

For the Greeks this was self-evident. Later times have often focused on one to the exclusion of the other. "Through the Looking Glass" is a double entendre, referring as it does to Lewis CarrollÕs masterpiece of the absurd, and that when we look into a mirror we see ourselves.

The truly exciting thing about mining the old stories is how exquisitely apropos they are. Gold can be found in these motifs. Certainly the Renaissance, the Neo-Classicists, and the Federalists were consciously co-opting images and architectural motifs. But conversely and darkly, so was Hitler.

Because the stories of the Greeks have embedded themselves so cunningly into our unanalyzed selves I think it is the artist's duty to re-examine them critically for our own age. This is not to disavow them but to see their essential truths in the light of our own particular predicaments.