Caela Dela Cruz

liberosis, oil and acrylic on canvas paper, 60” x 30”, 2020

• Senior Exhibition
• May 10 to 15, 2021
• Stan State Art Space

Join us for Stan State art student Caela Dela Cruz's Looking Glass Exhibition. The Looking Glass exhibitions are a display of the artist's work at the Art Space downtown gallery, viewable from the exterior sidewalk. On display 24/7!

Artist Statement

I relish in the intimate dance a painter plays with a nascent image and the transference of living ideas from the image to its viewer. There are times I begin a painting only to find myself completely lost and out of sync. But steadily as the days go by and layers build, an image will reveal its direction as though it was there from the start. It is a moment of recognition and surprise that carries such familiarity, as though in its manifestation an image is returning to me rather than passing through me - as though these images are ever-present.

In applying the final layer of the surface, I arrive at the conclusion of my part in the life of the image. As its painter, the image ends for me. But for its viewer, it lives on in the simple act of seeing and finds itself without end. For this reason, my best advice to those curious about how best to approach my work is to simply allow yourself an honest opportunity to be present with it. Allow yourself to have any experience with it, no matter how long or short, mundane or resonant - any experience will do. By seeing, what has been seen has already embedded itself in the complex reservoirs of the memory, subconscious, and feelings from which each of our subjective realities is constructed. In allowing yourself to have a moment with an image, you invite it to someday return, whether in the form of an idea, memory, motif, or never to return at all. It is this way that something living through one person is transferred through another. It is an experience that blurs the edges between where one life begins and other ends, with such automatic fluidity it suggests that there were no edges between each life, to begin with.