Home

Scenic Arts

Sculptures

Paintings

Rituals

Resume

Image Index

Judy Varga

Vancouver, B.C.
Canada
(604) 570-0555
send email

photography
by Judy Varga

Scenic Arts

Bear Paw Cradle (from the series Passage to Primordial Time)
Hand felted and dyed wool, cedar boughs and fir saplings, 60"x48"x4"
(for sale)
1991

Bear Paw Cradle (from the series Passage to Primordial Time)
Hand felted and dyed wool, cedar boughs and fir saplings, 60"x48"x4"
(for sale)
1991

Bear Paw Cradle (from the series Passage to Primordial Time)
Hand felted and dyed wool, cedar boughs and fir saplings, 60"x48"x4"
(for sale)
1991

Mayan Temple Steles
Carved and painted styrofoam, 30"x30"x120"
G.I. Joe / Commercial
1993

Bird Man Mask, B.C. West Coast style ritual mask
Latex paint on faux woodgrained cedar, 24"x10"
Millennium /TV Series
1998

Bird Man Mask (opened to reveal Man mask), B.C. West Coast style ritual mask
Latex paint on faux woodgrained cedar, 24"x 10"
Millennium /TV Series
1998

Shaman Mask #1, B.C. West Coast style ritual mask
Latex paint on faux woodgrained cedar, horse hair, 11"x26"
Millennium /TV Series
1998

Shaman Mask #2, B.C. West Coast style ritual mask
Latex paint on faux woodgrained cedar, horse hair, 11"x26"
Millennium /TV Series
1998

Petroglyphs, B.C. West Coast style petroglyphs
Carved and painted styrofoam, 48"x36"x14" approx
, Millennium /TV Series, 1998

Petroglyph, B.C. West Coast style petroglyph
carved and painted styrofoam, 48"x36"x14" approx.
Millenium /TV Series
1998

Painting

The Gift, Egyptian Series
Latex paint, plaster, and wood, 25"x25"
Collection of Ilona Varga
1999

Garden in Thebes, Egyptian Series
Latex paint, plaster, and wood, 25"x26"
(for sale)
2000

Tropical Sunset,
acrylics on metite wood, 14"x24",
2000 (for sale)

Hornby Island Arbutus,
acrylics on metite wood, 10"x17",
2002 (for sale)

Pitt River Dyke,
acrylics on metite wood, 9"x18",
2002 (for sale)

Cawston Hills,
acrylics on metite wood, 16"x29",
2002 (for sale)

Russian Icon #1,
scenic paint and gold leaf on wood, 48"x76",
Millennium /TV Series,
1999

Russian Icon #2,
scenic paint and gold leaf on wood, 48"x120",
Millennium / TV Series,
1999

Picking White Flowers,
latex paint on plastered wood tiles, 36"x48",
Millennium / TV Series,
1999

Russian Icon #3, (hero prop and double),
scenic paint and gold leaf on plastered wood, 18"x22",
Millennium / TV Series,
1999

Rituals

The Arc/K: Sculpture / Private Ritual

Celebrates the origin of the River of Fire in the lava tube at Rogue River, Crater Lake National Park, Oregon.

The tube is lit with a horseshoe magnet formation of eleven candles suspended from the tube at twilight.

TABLE OF NOON/MAT OF THE MOON
(I planted gardens of fire/confederations of fire)


This sculpture is the locus of a ritual passage, which is concerned with reconciling the polarity of the elements fire, air, earth, and water by presenting them in balanced proportions. An abandoned concrete foundation, nestled in a grove on a patch of light, provided the initial circumscribed ground plan upon which was placed a coiling stream of aluminum sheeting. Floating on this mirrored circuit is a series of candles planted in aluminum rings at regular intervals. A bed of finely textured sand lying parallel to the stream marks the passage for the procession to light the candles. The work is a cyclic and interwoven time—space metaphor: an instrument of transit, a “magnetic field” of light and energy, of ritual immersion, revealed primarily through the kinesthetic experience of body perception, empathy, action/reaction, and memory.

As the candles are being lit during the procession, they come to fruition, slowly progressing from a scintilla to a radiant field, which binds and dissolves at the edge of reflection. The ritual involves the performers walking through the open, maze—like configuration, lighting each candle consecutively, at a slow, even pace,. Branching off from the central aisle, the performers trace the periphery of the structure, approaching the center, and converging at the core. Having completed the lighting process, they retrace their path, unspiralling only to converge again at the aisle where the journey began.

In celebration of the process of alchemical transformation, as it is perceived by the body/mind, the rite of passage will be performed at twilight, the locus of transformation, (where earth and sky overlap and become grounded~ when solar light/ energy gives over to lunar light/energy). At that point, the body, acting as catalyst, reactivates the light/energy/action, which recede from the earth as the sun sets below the horizon and initiates them into the tangible realm.

The physical residue of the event, the record of the “tract”, now displaced and transformed, recalls the original frame of reference and calls for its regeneration. Through the shared enactment of this rite of passage, the event, place, and object manifest a common contextual pattern, one that extends through space and time. The sequence of the ritual (public or private) represents a perpetual balance, a cyclical process of forming and transforming through which we gain access to a world in which opposites are reconciled.

* The title for this piece was excerpted from the poems “The petrifying petrified” & “San Ildefonso nocturne” by Octavio Paz.”

“MAS”, a synthesizer composition by John Watts, was played at twilight during the rite of passage. Watts, who has been called a “wizard of the ARP” for his pioneering use of synthesizers, intends MAS as a visionary quest, a search that is essentially spiritual in nature, reflecting the timelessness and diversity of life —— ever—changing yet ever the same, always evoking our mature unrest as well as our highest aspirations

GEOMETRY OF ECHOES CONVERGE

Through hallucination and imagination, one can create a realism that pierces right to the core of the sensual, the this—worldly. Rupturing the surface of things, the habitual perception, and filtering through layers of meaning and form, one can create a realism that defies complacent realism.

My work seems to depend on a sense of dislocation vis a vis the comfortable, habitual. way of perceiving. In order to pursue this sense, it is necessary to descend into the chaos of unmitigated experience with all its crosscurrents, illusions, expanding and contracting boundaries, and raw terror, power, and beauty. The element of material tension in transmuted matter (a solid split open to reveal a liquid core mound as body, body as vessel) suggests the dislocation and dissolution of the boundaries between artifact and nature, between object and place.

The mounds, in their apparent orbit on a vertical/horizontal axis, are intimately bound with the generating forces of nature. They are the loci around which the elements dance, spin, overlap, overturn, link and scatter. The water and the wind are at once form and content, the container and the contained. As motive powers, the bodies of water and wind wrap themselves around the mounds and the mounds spin the water/wind around their axes. The nexus, which binds the three mounds with the water and is primarily connected with the actions of the wind on the water exists at the equator of each mound the edge of reflection, of echo.


earthwork, permanent (temporal)

recharge basin (managed by the Dept. of Transportation, NY) Old Westbury, NY.

dimensions:basin — 200' x 400' x 35'deep mounds — 38' diameter x 12' high at center

(size and shape of mounds and water level vary according to.climatic and seasonal changes)

materials: ochre colored coarse gravel, medium grained sand, fine sand. (heaviest/largest grained material is at the base of the mounds, lightest/smallest grained material is on top.)

Home | Scenic Arts | Sculptures | Paintings | Rituals | Resume