Dark Retreat, photographs by David L. Armstrong
Armstrong resides in Berkeley, CA. Dark Retreat represents his first public exhibition of photography.
Dark Retreat:
Upon finding this phrase and learned it’s meaning I felt a personal connection to what the Tibetan practitioners experience and a state I enter while taking photographs, a “deep seeing” state. A transformation of seeing through the lens, igniting the imagination and snuffing out the quotidian. I hope my images cause a visceral feeling in the viewer, a sense of wonder and how it felt to see in our youth when it was so easy to cross into the world of imagination.
“In Tibet, practitioners of the Great Perfection, or Dzogchen, explore all these themes by undertaking a “dark retreat.” Early European visitors to Tibet imagined that monks were being buried alive, and indeed Tibetans themselves view the dark retreat as a means to simulate the processes of sleeping and dying. They also see it as an opportunity to explore the peripheries of consciousness and thus, they say, to reveal a point of origin where the natural freedom of the imagination is expressed.
The typical Tibetan dark retreat lasts for seven weeks. It does not take long for its practitioners to begin perceiving incessantly changing cloud-like displays, vague forms that come and go in the darkness. As one thirteenth-century author recounts, “The visions tumble like water falling down a cliff face, or like mercury scattering and beading together. They are unstable, arising and ceasing, scattering and regathering, shaking and quivering. Inwardly, one’s experience of concentration is weak and fleeting, and as the visions wax and wane.”
Opening reception August 7th at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
with live performances by:
Beast Nest w/ Alexander Brown, songs for puppies
http://
Gradient Fade, deep spiritual vibes enhanced by a penetrating gaze
https://
Smiles, lo-key christian folk/emo
http://soundcloud.com/