The Heartened Mind Behind Lamblyoptic
A Bachelorette, twice over, with lovers film arts and philosophy.
Priority: immersion in movement and images, sharing what wisdom there is to be gleaned
waiting for the end of the world, since there is no more interesting thing
than hoping for love at the end of everything.
Lamblyoptic, 29; 2018.Photograph from a series by @brain_visions (instagram)
WRITER | ARTIST | PHOTOGRAPHER | VIDEOGRAPHER | AUTOHARPIST | RABBLE-ROUSER
Had the privilege of studying visual art at North Carolina School of the Arts. Went on to study photography in earnest under Maritza Molina of Miami, FL while at Penland School of Crafts, and Julia Cybularz of Philadelphia, PA while studying abroad in Prague, CZ.
Completed degrees in Film Arts and Philosophy at The University of New Orleans.
Currently based in Durham, NC.
ART-ISM
Self Portrait, Easter, 2019.
Self-portraiture had, for me, always been a door to art. It always seemed to have to be art. A copy, a facsimile, reflection, perception, a part, a piece, never could be the whole.
But I could try.
spirit-ual dwelling place: about the artist
Manipulating space and time and matter and energy is no small thing. Making the world in your own image?
When is it yours?
EatenSelf-Portrait, Penland, 2011
JESUS!
Christianity started as a place I could at least find art, love, symbolism, and wisdom, and didn't have to be any particular kind of thing to do it. I liked just about everything Jesus said. I thought that shit felt good in a balanced way that challenged an individual to have reason, and compassion. Christianity was fine with me.
The hero was a peaceful man who had been simplified, desexualized, and then dispassionately murdered, like Socrates, and plenty of martyrs, mystics, apostates and heretics of old. To be fair, Jesus had been an Essene for a time, but I'd need him to tell me he's a virgin to my face for me to know for sure. And sometimes, I think, I am Jesus. Or I know him, but sometimes my arms bend back. And maybe this has all been going on a very long time.
In my Gnosticism I have found that the naive, pathetic Jesus of my forefathers is not the man they thought he was (or at least, who they made him out to be). He was subversive. He was dark and uncanny and strange. He was a rabble-rousing slut-loving anarchistic martyr of the highest order.
BirthSelf-Portrait Series, Penland, 2011
PISTIS SOPHIA
I was and am a woman. Males and females of my family made sure to let me know exactly what that meant. No authority. No connection to God.
It meant lesser than. Inferiority. That they would admit. But they weren't just talking to me, the boys were listening too. "A woman's job is to be married and submit to her husband. That's not me, that's God," my older brother flaunted at me, winning the argument. Unclean. Corrupt.
Lamblyoptic, 30; 2018.Photograph by @brain_visions (instagram)
My reactionary rebellion was to look at the God I was given and see what the hell happened there.
And what is yet to happen.
Enter Sophia.
In Pistis Sophia Jesus went to the other and found Sophia suffering, oppressed by the 12 powers and calling out to the Light, over and over, while her son-God reigned his chaos and the world went to shit while she’s not where she belongs in the 13th aeon. Then Jesus saves her and says her taking her true place will be the coming of The Beginning/End.
Right here, baby.
Patriarchy
How did manhood's fixation on the weaknesses of women expose their abusive and insecure core motivations for doing so?
Were they the ones Jesus really came to save? The ones least likely to listen to the spirit? Isn't there an equal message of spirit necessary both for men and women? What do we need to learn from each other to move forward?
Femine AnxietyAnimation made at University of New Orleans, 2016
Unlovable. Only there for use and exploitation. Nothing matters. Men and women, all disposable, all selfish, all gonna die. We watch this play out in the movies all the time. Be a good husband or wife and just settle down and do what those things are supposed to do: make more people with the same problems. Achieve Fatherhood as an escape from being powerless. Embrace Motherhood as an escape from being a whore.
CircumscriptionSelf-Portrait, Penland, 2011
why be sweet why be careful why be kind a man has only one thing on his mind why ask politely why go lightly why say please they only want to get you on your knees
Seems to be something both sides would say of the Other. And everyone's got one. If you're a Satanist, it's the Christians. A Christian, and - you know, anyone else. Same of just about any ideology. But I am so grateful mine doesn't require homogeniety and that I enjoy relationships with a spectrum of people with opinions that vary dramatically from mine, including about women and men and their relationship.
And in some ways, they didn't, and much of what I reacted to was implicit. Even though I moved around a lot, I was always in the Bible Belt. That was on purpose.
So I try to reckon with the tradition I was given and it has led me to fascinating territory. Christian mysticism has a history that includes the forced silencing of an entire philosophy and culture in the name of deifying the institution. Looking at civilization as a whole, we may find ourselves at the crossroads of some evolutionary gain, actively and passively determining just what we ask for, and from, what's next on our plate. We didn't know about Gnosticism except from evil church fathers until their original documents were discovered in a trove in 1945. Only whispers and secrets and rare antiquities and secret societies of the darkest arts before all that. Now, primary mystical subversive early Christian writings, same year as the goddamn bomb.
How else does the realm of villainy maintain its supremacy over our culture but to keep good, healthy ideas from the people who could use them to their benefit to free the chains that bind them? Make us all beholden to scarcity and shame?
Can we be heaven's seed?
[FIRST FILM: UNGROUNDED. FILMED @ MASONIC CEMETERY, NEW ORLEANS]
