Eric Standley

Statement

If you get close enough to a small patch of moss in a forest, you can hear how it absorbs sound, tends to be cooler than the air above, and smells like decaying leaves. If you look even closer, you might notice the subtle movement of shadows that come from high above where tree leaves move to allow light through the forest’s canopy. In the distance and in my memory, I can hear children playing in the neighborhood through the woods behind the house I grew up in.

Everything in my world view is a subspace of something else. I see the smaller to know the larger and find relationships that inform the whole. Love is the root-interval of my value system when I observe or create these scaled relationships. Paper as a medium aligns with love through its humble innocence, vulnerability, and fragility. I do not signify things that already exist, preferring to find an artwork’s essence through my heart, as if discovered for the first time. If an idea holds my patience, curiosity, and tenacity long enough to be completed in my studio, then it has come to fruition through love.

Paradox of  faith

I like the thought that faith itself is a unifying bond across humanity. Within each individualized need to believe there are patterns of commonality that have the potential to transcend our differences and unite us by way of human familiarity. I see patterns in mythologies across cultures, in the rituals of faith in religions, and in the objects and spaces that we have chosen to hold sacred. They are found in the theories of DNA packing, and in the self-similar replication of fractals. Faith is not a tradition, but rather an intrinsic consciousness that exists across humanity. The utopian dreams of modernism were reckless fantasies of platonic idealism that often excluded the complexities of humanness. The essence of life is a perception of existence, witnessed by individualized perspectives. We are connected by our surroundings, our overlapping existences, and through the archetypical pattens that occupy our collective sub-conscious. Believing in something larger than ourselves includes the recognition of our shared fragility.