Brad Melamed

"Everything is You (Waterlily)and Perception Changing Materiality (Waterlily) are part of two large series of works made from images found in 1960s era biology textbooks. Each piece is composed of a single animal or nature image that is cropped into 24 sections. Enlarged, these croppings create the montage effect in Perception Changing Materiality. The cropped image then offers both a palette and ground for abstract expressionistic drawing in You Are Everything. The computer eyedropper tool picks up a color that is assigned to the eraser, which is used as a drawing tool. The act of erasing paradoxically becomes a means of revealing another experience as each page contributes to the total gestalt of the subject....For me, these works are depictions of transformative states of awareness where all phenomena can be experienced as energy —vibration, light, particle, and movement. Polarities in these states of expanded consciousness are no longer rooted in human psychology and its ensuing moralities: erasure becomes creation, individual becomes collective, and linear time becomes simultaneous time, all resulting in a metaphysical economy of dynamic abundance."—Brad Melamed