For nearly three decades and with fearless commitment, Bonita Helmer has engaged in a kind of existential/theosophical abstract painting which ranges over a wide variety of not easy themes. According to the artist, her large gestural fields of galaxy like roiling spheres hope to invoke both spiritual and practical human questions-- the expanse of consciousness, the range of deep space, our relationship to our cosmos, our planet, and by extension, to each other.
A student of meditation, Buddhism, Kabbalistic mysticism , and new physics, Helmer is equally comfortable with close friends like Francoise Gilot, the late Jonas Salk, as well as Cal Tech scientists and avid collectors who design the computer systems that send objects to faraway stars. In fact it is the images sent back to earth by Hubble that inspire both Helmer’s art and personal meditations on our place in some cosmic scheme of things.
Works like There Are Strings are intended by her to communicate the contractions and expansions, transpositions of energy which both science and spiritualism tell us are at the basis of the universe and our understanding of it. Theosophic, mystical, tantric conceptions of "unity" are referenced via materials and form. For example, her surfaces look rocky and meteoric and ephemeral at once; the sense of space she creates is both palpable like the air in a fog, and immaterial. Helmer's fields look like they are contracting and expanding at the same moment; your vision is localized at a circular mass of color but also spreads to the edges in all directions.
Helmer notes that ironically enough, at its most sophisticated, science starts to look like a first cousin to ancient Eastern and Mid Eastern mystical traditions. Einstein’s imaginings of deep space equated energy, matter and light into one system; more recently, particle physics looked deep inside the smallest matter to find that in and through it there is anti matter--its doppelganger or mirror entity lacking dimension, space, or charge but no less “present.” String Theory and cosmic consciousness start looking like neighbors and these complexities fascinate and inspire Helmer.
To speak with the artist you come to see that she believes staunchly that art can still engage in this kind of collective meaning-making, that art can still offer us a way to comprehend who and what we are, to take the fracture of post modern experience and find something unified and unitary in it. Helmer's work has been a career long effort to remind us that categorical oppositions are to a great extent artifactual. In her micro and macro visual references to phenomena infinitely larger than us (deep space, the birth of stars) and intimately linked to us/our bodies (cells, vascular systems, air and light), Helmer uses abstract form as a kind of a ritual action and ritual space where she (and we if we are so inclined) investigate the unity of human consciousness and the human condition.
Excerpt from catalogue essay by:
Marlena Doktorczyk- Donohue
Associate Professor of Art History and Contemporary Art
Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Otis College of Art and Design
A student of meditation, Buddhism, Kabbalistic mysticism , and new physics, Helmer is equally comfortable with close friends like Francoise Gilot, the late Jonas Salk, as well as Cal Tech scientists and avid collectors who design the computer systems that send objects to faraway stars. In fact it is the images sent back to earth by Hubble that inspire both Helmer’s art and personal meditations on our place in some cosmic scheme of things.
Works like There Are Strings are intended by her to communicate the contractions and expansions, transpositions of energy which both science and spiritualism tell us are at the basis of the universe and our understanding of it. Theosophic, mystical, tantric conceptions of "unity" are referenced via materials and form. For example, her surfaces look rocky and meteoric and ephemeral at once; the sense of space she creates is both palpable like the air in a fog, and immaterial. Helmer's fields look like they are contracting and expanding at the same moment; your vision is localized at a circular mass of color but also spreads to the edges in all directions.
Helmer notes that ironically enough, at its most sophisticated, science starts to look like a first cousin to ancient Eastern and Mid Eastern mystical traditions. Einstein’s imaginings of deep space equated energy, matter and light into one system; more recently, particle physics looked deep inside the smallest matter to find that in and through it there is anti matter--its doppelganger or mirror entity lacking dimension, space, or charge but no less “present.” String Theory and cosmic consciousness start looking like neighbors and these complexities fascinate and inspire Helmer.
To speak with the artist you come to see that she believes staunchly that art can still engage in this kind of collective meaning-making, that art can still offer us a way to comprehend who and what we are, to take the fracture of post modern experience and find something unified and unitary in it. Helmer's work has been a career long effort to remind us that categorical oppositions are to a great extent artifactual. In her micro and macro visual references to phenomena infinitely larger than us (deep space, the birth of stars) and intimately linked to us/our bodies (cells, vascular systems, air and light), Helmer uses abstract form as a kind of a ritual action and ritual space where she (and we if we are so inclined) investigate the unity of human consciousness and the human condition.
Excerpt from catalogue essay by:
Marlena Doktorczyk- Donohue
Associate Professor of Art History and Contemporary Art
Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Otis College of Art and Design
