2022. So many questions.

Where are we? Where have we been? And are we coming or going?

How do we face the social and political issues of our time? Can we break through existing structures and frames in our society to end senseless violence? Are we memorializing or are we delivering hope for the victims and our society’s future? Is offering moments of remembrance of lives cut short enough, the only thing we can do? Can we “delve right into the incompleteness and instability of the modern world, rather than trying to get back to the garden”?1  

In times of rapid change, we are faced with unsettling facts. After World War I the German artist Max Beckmann was nearly mad from serving on Flander’s fields. He returned and wrote in 1920, “We must participate in the great misery to come. We have to lay our hearts and nerves bare to the deceived cries of people who have been lied to . . .  the whole justification for our existence as artists, superfluous and egotistic though we are, is to confront people with the images of their destiny.” 2

Or should we remain in our garden, if we are so lucky, and hope others find their way back to our collective garden? Or work to create a more inclusive garden to provide a better life for all humankind?

Here, we present interactions and explore the visual world – symbols and scenes from our present, both joyful and troubling. We hope that you can find your own garden and help others discover their own in the future. Or maybe, you will be reminded you are already in the garden of your dreams.

Thank you for viewing.   -- Jim Stanton

1 - Jason Farago, Looking Inward, and Back, at a Biennale for the History Books, NYT, April 30, 2022

2 - Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Art and the Century of Change, Thames and Hudson, 1990, 290