2025.10.22 Gwen Smith 1099 LRG 1.jpg
2025.01.21 Gwen Smith1031 SML.jpg

In 721 AD, two Kannon goddess statues were carved out of one sacred tree in present day Nara, Japan.

One was enshrined at the Hasedera temple in Nara, the other was cast into the ocean on a prayer that it would reappear as a savior wherever it made land fall. The flung statue drifted for fifteen years, coming ashore in Kamakura. In 736 AD, another Hasedera temple was established to enshrine the rescued Kannon goddess statue. According to the legend, oysters attached themselves to her figure while she was lost at sea and helped guide the statue to her landing place.

The Kakigara-inari Goddess (oyster shell shrine) collage is embellished by a photography session shot in 1992 for the book- Black Nudes (with me as the subject)

The alternate collage- Othering the ship (Original) - [exhibited in THE ROSE at CPW, Kingston May -August 2025] uses the same photo shoot from 1992 and a gouache painting based on an abstract linear sunset and the cover of the Endgame catalog

The collages are a tribute to medium format film photography that I made in Japan (summer 2025) and the portrait session of me at the age of 23 in Harlem in 1992

BODHISATTVA CORRELATIONS -2025

I photographed in shrines and temples on my recent trip to Japan and found an affinity with representations of bodhisattvas (a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings) These figures and the “plank” behind them- (a symbolic element known as a mandorla or prabhamandala which are frames or auras that encircle the entire body of a holy or sacred figure representing divine radiance, spiritual enlightenment, and sacredness, signifying a transcendent reality beyond ordinary time and space. “mandorla” (Italian for almond) can also be circular, horseshoe, fan or leaf-shaped, decorated, with patterns including flame motifs, further emphasizing the radiating light) and form a relationship to the surfer in front of their surf boards -a pose that often occurs in my work. The contact sheet I constructed remains whole, while the blank forms from the images that have been “stripped bare” became elements in the collages that make up