TIBET HOUSE US presents
TENDREL – རྟེན་འབྲེལ – Interconnections
January 9, 2015 – March 2, 2015
Tibet House US is delighted to present TENDREL – རྟེན་འབྲེལ – Interconnections, an exhibition featuring artists whose lives and art have been changed by the life and work of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. This diverse selection of painting, sculpture and photography depict and embody the theme of connectivity unique to Tibetan culture, faith, spiritual life, meditation, activism and particularly its women practitioners.
The exhibition includes: Award-winning journalist and photographer, Peter Aronson, who exhibits photos from, Dharamsala: Three Generations of Tibetan Exiles, his series composed over five years in Dharamsala, India, home to the exiled Tibetan Dalai Lama and his followers. His work is a meaningful investigation of the lives of three generations of the Tibetan Exiles.
Photographer, Diane Barker, provides an intimate look at the spirit and simplicity of the nomadic people of Amdo and Kham, situated among the wild eastern borderlands of Tibet. Hers is an evocation of a way of life under threat, as Chinese rule takes measures to contain their migrations with fences dividing up the sprawling grasslands open to nomads for millennia.
The interdisciplinary artist, Caterina De Re, integrates electronic and contemporary arts with her meditation practice, social activism, and voice. In 2013, De Re documented senior yoginis and yogis in Tibet, filming their stories of women’s lineage, including survival during and after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, all the while keeping their Dharma practice intact.
Painter, Mary DeVincentis, exhibits The Miksang Series. ‘Miksang’ is Tibetan for “good eye”, or perceiving and experiencing without the filter of the conceptualizing mind through the contemplation of the smallest detail, or most fleeting image, as a means to evoke joy and awareness of the human interconnectedness to the fabric of life. The paintings exhibited derive from traditional Tibetan Buddhist iconography of a devotional nature, particularly the female Buddha Tara in her twenty-one manifestations.
New York visual artist and photographer, Maxine Henryson, presents Bylakuppe, India, a series of impressionistic poems on Indian cultures unified through the lens of color. In chance encounters the extraordinary is made visible in the ordinary—a deity is transformed into a butterfly; a stretched sari becomes an orange veil. Photographs here evoke visual memory lingering among religious rituals, the female world and nature.
Filmmaker, Heather Kessinger, presents photographs on the making of her film, In the Shadow of the Buddha, about the sequestered world of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in northernmost India. The photographs, like the film, is as much about beauty, poverty, hope, and faith, as it portrays the women, old and young, who share the truth of the kitchen and the classroom, their hardships and triumphs in everyday life. On a deeper level, Kessinger photographs the paradox that being a woman within Tibetan Buddhism represents.
Multi- media artist, Chrysanne Stathacos presents photographs and works from her Rose Mirror Mandala of Three Reflections series, a circular structure-in-process that changes over time, from its creation by plucking dozens of roses apart petal by petal and laid out on the floor to encircle a colored mirror. Left to dry, the petals reduce to a quarter of their original size, a process described by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo to be evocative of “the gradual unfolding of our innate spiritual potential” by embodying the process through which the enlightened human consciousness grows more ephemerally beautiful as the physical body withers away.
In 2010, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo asked Tsunma Jamyang Donma of Yulokod Studios, Toronto, Canada, to produce two stained glass Thangka creations: a 36-inch diameter Green Tara and a 36-inch diameter Prajnaparamita, for the Temple at DGL. Dedicated to the craft of hand painted stained glass Thangkas and Buddhist sacred imagery in painted glass, Yulokod Studios’s Buddhist lineage and connections to qualified Thangka artists will be represented by photographs representing the windows from the DGL Nunnery Temple.
Painter, installation artist and printmaker, Kate Temple, exhibits her Mantra Series, works on paper using watercolor, saffron and handmade oak-gall ink. The paintings are made to recall the spirit of Presence during painting and mantra practice, while specifically evoking the meditative connectedness of traditional Tantric painting practices.
ABOUT Tibet House US
Tibet House US, established in 1987 at the request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is a non-profit educational institution and cultural embassy working to preserve, restore and present Tibet’s unique cultural and spiritual heritage by means of a permanent cultural center, with a 2,000-square-foot gallery, library, archives, developing traveling exhibitions, print publications and media productions.
Since opening in 1998, the Tibet House Gallery has featured exhibitions of classical and contemporary Tibetan art, as well as modern and contemporary art inspired by Tibetan culture