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Landscapes and Mindscapes

StarLight Tews and John Riggs, two Madison-based photographers, team up
to explore the dynamic interrelationship between events of the mind and vistas
of the world as received through the eye. By contrasting the subjective and objective,
the feminine and masculine, the inner vision with the outer, the viewer is given an
opportunity to experience the possibility of apparently opposing worldviews.

Images for this exhibit have been selected from on-going projects of the
artists, including John’s Tree Line of Rocky Mountain National Park,
Landscapes of the SandHill country of Northwestern Nebraska,
and StarLight's continuing artistic soul journies
including images from the back yard to the cosmos!

When:
Now through September, 2010

Where:
Overture Center's Playhouse Gallery
201 State Street in downtown Madison

The Playhouse Gallery is the long elegant corridor in the Overture lower level across from
The Playhouse Theater and adjacent to the Rotunda Stage. Enter through Henry St. Entrance,
or go downstairs one flight from the Rotunda Lobby.


Landscapes and Mindscapes: A Photographic Synthesis of
Two Divergent Responses to the Natural World

Dane County’s gentle landscape and the Great Plains and Mountains to the west serve both as primary source material and a source of inspiration to Madison-based professional fine art photographers StarLight Tews and John Riggs. The work of both photographers share the common assumption that the meaning of our lives is largely formed and framed by the shapes, colors, weather, and geography about us.

Through the work of these two photographers we are provided the opportunity to compare and contrast a fundamental difference between two apparently divergent world views, one essentially Eastern, the other Western.

StarLight Tews’ work is a brilliant example of the former. Deconstructing the world through her camera lens, she extracts bits and pieces of her experience of the natural setting to build vast mental/emotional landscapes, or “Mandalas.” Be it in the journey around the circumference or the pathways that lead us to the center, these stunning circles of meaning and beauty evoke a meditative reality, leading us into new internal and subjective depths. Underlying this approach is the view that what we know of the real world outside of ourselves is a mental construct: to discover real meaning we must dive deep inside to create our own.

By contrast, the landscapes of John Riggs, with accompanying textual captions, look outward to discover our relationship to what is beautiful, meaningful, and/or evocative in nature as we observe it. The landscape becomes a mirror, a reflection of an internal spiritual continuum, and to journey across the land is to journey across the emotional landscape of the human heart. To feel deeply is to enter into relationship with the world outside of ourselves and the people and places in it.

These two apparently opposing views of the nature of reality are equally powerful. Indeed, for thousands of years they have disrupted communications between cultures. Some would argue that they have been equally confounding to relations between the genders when the circular, rotating, internal, and essentially subjective female expressions meet the traditionally linear, horizontal, rational, external, or “objective” male world.

By intermingling these two worldviews, coexisting side-by-side in meditative absorption, as it were, the viewer is first given the opportunity to experience the jolt of opposing truths - then guided to experience the pleasure of a resolution of a universal conflict that exists, on one level or another, within all of us. Inherent in the work of both artists are visual suggestions toward resolution of such apparent opposites. Both are concerned with the primary relationship with the inner and outer worlds. By joining the Yin with the Yang, the inward-looking with the outward-looking, fire with ice, our hope is that sufficient energy for fusion and resolution is generated.