Visitation By the Muse is an installation which sends the viewer on a journey through the artist’s struggle with his artistic process and by means of that process, his discovery of his creative source.
In its debut exhibit at the Holter Museum of Art in 1996, the gallery was transformed into an artist’s studio, with furniture, carpets, plants and the various detritus that indicates a lived-in workspace. The feeling that the viewer has stumbled into the studio in the midst of the artist’s creative madness is suggested by such immediate personal details as a pile of mail, a boom box playing adagio-like music, half a cup of coffee on a table.
The major focus of the installation is nearly 100 drawings, many as large as 7 by 3 ft., not displayed as completed works but as indicators of the artist’s sometimes frenzied attempt to pinpoint the scope and character of his creative muse. The drawings are attached to walls and special panels in an informal, even haphazard way, sometimes crowded on top of each other, and even torn and wrinkled into wads and scattered about the gallery.
Entries from the artist’s journal appear scrawled behind some of the drawings or reproduced very much enlarged on torn scraps of paper throughout the exhibit. The installation is divided into three sections, each announced by a suspended acrylic sign imprinted with a passage of scripture.
The installation takes participants through my dynamic and terrifying months-long encounter with my own muse archetype. We witness the process of discovering and honoring creative joy along with its shadow– the positive but dark, destructive force– the “duende”. Creativity is a willingness to enter into the wilderness of the unconscious. But civilization is a direct negation of this wildness. So how do we nurture creativity and still stay civilized?
The possibilities of personal revelation are invited through interfacing with the personal and collective archetypal wilderness of the journey. Following Jungian principles of the Anima’s appearance for a man, the journey leads participants thorough an invitation to develop their own creative ecology.