Expansion

This is something I stumbled on a few months back, and like all the other pieces of work I find, no one ever includes the artist, just one picture. Well I researched for a very long time and found her. She's Paige Bradley and a lot of her work focuses around the central theme of containment and what would happen if we expanded beyond our barriers:

"From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a container already built for us to fit inside: A social security number, a gender, a race, a profession or an I.Q. I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in, rather than what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies? Would we still be able to exist if we were authentically 'un-contained'?"

This piece makes me think of that moment just as someone in deep meditation finally reaches enlightenment. When they realize that they are apart of something far grander than the self and at that point, their bodies dissolve away and there's nothing left but a pure light.

Once upon a time this was in NY but I believe it has been relocated to some less public garden area of some kind which is kind of disappointing because the pictures with the cityscape as a backdrop are much more compelling than the foliage.