Larry Carlson: The Garment of Al Shaddai

I can't decide if it's her naked joining Siamese twin doubling, no quadrupling, breasts, though we can't see the other two, that disturb or that she is lying on some very stiff grass or a miniature forest, while a river flows past her, with a forest in the background and fuzzed edges so that she, who cannot walk, who has no womb or legs and could only roll if both twins are synchronized, is the focus. She is a beautiful digitalized woman with headbands. She's been cut up and recomposed with her mirror image. She is the creation of an artist. She becomes representative of chubby, mammalian life-forms 'out there' -"in Nature." She's helpless, but looking at the viewer seductively. Does she know she's been digitally altered and that her green screen has dissolved into a scenic outdoor scene in which she is the only representative of human life? Is she mutated? Is she dreaming herself in a totally weird Surreal dream of the 'commercialized woman' life?

This is an image created by the wild, humorous, brilliant multi-media artist Larry Carlson.

His art sets the imagination aflame. Does it for you?

Here she is again, cloned in the strange world of mutated images that are the hallmark of Carlson's art. Carlson has been famously described as the 'Salvadore Dali' of this century.



He calls this one, "The Garment of Al Shaddai." I found this: "Shaddai is one of the ten divine names quoted in the rabbinical legend of the angelic hierarchies. The essence influences the sphere of the moon: it causes increase and decrease and rules the jinn and protecting spirits."

Let your imagination wander in the fractal nautilus, around the Moon Goddess of eyes, the 'jinns' of the cloned mutated woman, the golden Ram and what is possibly a Lammasu, an Assyrian Sphinx, molecules that look like the grapes of the wild Dionysus, a red parrot that rests on a blue arm flung illogically out back of the 'Moon Goddess of Eyes' (is she perhaps a Hindu goddess too), the ground a pastel kaleidoscopic 'light table.' It is a world of the inner imagination, dream imagery, arcane symbols and hallucinatory visions. Carlson's work is 'psychedelic': "an English term coined from the Greek words for "soul," ψυχή (psyche), and "manifest," δήλος (delos)."

The soul manifest,
this is the garment of Al Shaddai.

Pylon by Larry Carlson

PYLON from Larry Carlson on Vimeo.

Began exploring Larry Carlson's videos today. There is a driving simplicity to this one. Though there is an overlay of images, mainly we witness a pulsing, throbbing, multi-colored pylon. It's primal - that heartbeat. Powerful, technologized, loud, slicing the air with its sound wave, but steady, organic. A pulsing diamond in a scaffolding, a sacred geometry structure, a pyramid. The light is bright, luminous, visionary, the colours, rich, primary, vibrant, its beating, pulsing is hypnotizing, and encompasses opposites of calming and energizing. The man who holds the pyramid is still throughout. His steady holding of the pulsing, shifting, changing, transforming pylon works well as a framing to the vital energy of the heart-like beating. Something grounding in that steady hand.

Do I hear all of life's pounding pulse here? Even our sun has 'heartbeats' - maybe a dozen a century.

If the universe itself has a 'heartbeat,' it would sound and look like "Pylon."

A short, brilliant art video. A woman in negative appears near the end laughing. The light is an exploding dance of colour. It could become obsessive, beating in our ear like Poe's 'Tell Tale Heart.' Only the imagery in this film is expansive, visionary. The pylon goes through phases of beats, it's got a rhythm to its rich pulsing colours, returning to the simplicity of the original green screen occasionally; and the beat itself speeds up at one point, just like a real heart. It's like a highly-charged powered solar cell, this beating heart.

And what a gift to be able to download this! It's pulsing away in the corner of my iMac. "Pylon" is looped and playing endlessly. Like a bright eye: solar, oceanic; of crystal.

As I watch it, I think not only diamond, but exploding

atomic bomb.

Of the life force of the
seedpod.

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direct link to Pylon