when you have not been there,
your heart is full of longing (redux)
Lee Henderson

The trouble is, I don’t know who I am.

I was once asked why I would be so invested in something, specifically Zen Buddhism, that is outside of my culture. I don’t know where the borders of that culture are, and I refuse to believe that they exactly overlap the borders of Canada, or North America, or Christendom, or something equally arbitrary.

Maybe there are actual, physical barriers to culture--things like race, age, geography, topography. But equally likely is that these barriers are synthetic, and grow from the desire to make the world a compartmentalized, easily-understood system.

How much more efficient this would be were there an impermeable, plastic barrier around each culture, one that could prevent objects and tendencies and ideas from passing through and infiltrating (or infecting, or impregnating) the environment beyond. It is this suspicion around otherness and identification that I'm exploring in these images. A Bodhisattva covered by a condom is still a Bodhisattva, but we can only see it through a filmy yellow shield. It is the perception, therefore, that is flawed and distorted, while the Bodhisattva statue is unchanged. Similarly, a wasp that is connected surgically to a Buddha is still distinct as a wasp.

These are works of self-portraiture, but they are by no means particular to my own circumstance. I’m not sure which part of the image is me; I would love to be a Buddha, but I worry that I am one of the wasps. Maybe the solution to this is a perpetual puncturing; while the general is a barrier, the specific has a way of poking through it and rendering it permeable.

–Lee Henderson, 2008

Exhibiton Date: November 26 to December 18, 2009
Opening Reception: November 26, 7 to 10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 28,
2pm in the Front Room Gallery

gallery   Makowichuk & French   Chris Cooper