Parables of a Non-self: Three Videos for an Empty Mind, an exhibition of videos by Eddie Lohmeyer, will be on display in the smALL Press Library on the second floor of Arts + Literature Laboratory from Friday, March 17 to Saturday, April 15, 2023. An opening reception for all of the current exhibtions will be held Friday, March 24 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.
In Parables of a Non-self: Three Videos for an Empty Mind, Eddie Lohmeyer explores relationships among digital culture, bodily identity, and concepts of impermanence in Eastern traditions. Through experimental forms of animation and techniques in glitch, AI, and performance, Lohmeyer imagines his own body as an avatar and spiritual wanderer moving through simultaneously existing versions of reality. Drawing from concepts in Buddhism and Taoism, the artist performs a kind of ritual drifting through the inherent suffering of life: a bold, yet joyful dance that resets itself within each moment, within each breath of the here and now.Using videogame tropes such as loops and two-dimensional side-scrollers, Lohmeyer imagines the mechanics of game engines as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of the world and the on- going reconstitution of experience that unfolds in the now. Through digital abstraction, each film uniquely explores what it means to look for spiritual enlightenment in a culture inundated by images, data, and algorithms that continually persuade us to forge new kinds of bodily subjectivities and identities. In Parables of a Non-self, these spiritual entities—a leaping mendicant, a desert wanderer on horseback, shapeshifting demigods—portray the artist’s body as a continuously fractalizing bundle of experiences, thoughts, and feelings that is impermanent through the manifestation of digitally constructed iterations of self.
Visions of Mona, digital video, B&W 3:33, 2022
Shrine of the Eternal Continue, digital video, 3:47, 2022
Studies for Cosmic Transmigration, digital video, 3:20, 2023
