Statement
I make dharma-art as a multidisciplinary contemporary practice by using mostly recycled equipment, found materials and amateur DIY methods. Focusing on my spontaneous clarity of vision and awareness (osel, Tibetan), as recognized within my study of traditional religious philosophies and daily praxis, I am trying to break down the wall between my lived experience and the electronically induced thinking/mediation that I feel trapped in. I use my spirituality as a hammer to smash up my advanced art training, and I use what I learned in art school to prevent me from clinging too tightly onto the states of mind I encounter during my contemplation and prayer.
My paintings are a visual-poetry that results from long sessions of mark-making and of repetitive reading OUTLOUD combined with mindfulness walking OUTSIDE-- working methods borrowed from traditions of contemplative practice in eastern and western religions. They are abstract maps of places, diagrams of texts, records of verbal performance, and portraits of writers that should invite and inspire viewers to engage in their own active meditation praxis.
I am also making a long-poem in the tradition of Ezra Pound Cantos using a lens-based practice that I call Osel Of My Eye. It is a stereocollage video-poem capturing those everyday synchronistic happenings that occur around me and within me in relation to my study and practice of contemplative philosophy as a liberative technique. The video is the result of using a modified analog still-image camera, along with both random and intentional montage and text, which are digitally compiled and edited.
Reusing older, dis-functional equipment and materials fits within my ethical desires to not waste what has already been made and to avoid causing more damage to the earth. Older consumer-level photographic methods, and discarded painting materials, also free me from the technocratic restrictions of striving to making work that is professionally correct and free of defects.
Biography
Gregory Fitzsimmons (Hobo 23)'s work is deeply motivated by his experiences as a military veteran, social worker, and peace and socail justice activist. He explores and maps places and identities via abstraction and conceptual processes based on his practice of Buddhist meditation. He grew up in an apartment building in Oak Park Illinois, raised by his mother and a reclusive grandmother. His grandfather was a gangster who had been shot to death a month before his mother was born. Greg has been aware of spirituality and of other intuitive perceptions from an early age due to his time spent with his grandmother, who was a practitioner of witchcraft and magick and who claimed to see ghosts and angels. In high school, Greg attended a free-form alternative program which allowed him to spend most of his time painting and making sound and digital art. After graduation, he joined the navy to gather experiences to feed his art. He moved back to Chicago and became deeply involved in the underground art, noise-music, and zine scenes. Greg also became an art-activist working on social justice issues around housing and homelessness, acting as a director of the West Town Tenets Union and working with his wife, community organizer Marla Bramble. He has worked as a community-based artist and educator since 2003, facilitating groups at community centers and in-patient mental health facilities, using the arts as a tool to teach wellness and self-empowerment. As well as exhibiting his own work as an artist, he also occasionally curates shows at Uss Gallery in Chicago and teaches at City Colleges of Chicago. He has an MFA in Studio Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.