At Moorpark College Art Gallery through January 21st, L. Aviva Diamond’s Light Streams, offers photographic art filled with the music of light, water, and stars. Dazzlingly large, Diamond’s work is an outgrowth of two smaller-scale series, Wave Nebulae and Tiny Immensities.
Here, with this larger scale work, she reaches into an interconnectedness with energy, divinity, meditation, and the beauty and significance of water, presenting viewers with an immersive experience.
Light Streams is an experiential exhibition that transports viewers into a spiritual, deep dimension. Diamond uses Photoshop to intensify a photographic experience blurring water and sky, photography and charcoal, as she puts it, “so that others can see with their eyes what I feel in my heart.”
She adds that “I want people to plunge into the images and feel that they are also part of nature, of this divine energy and vibrational harmony… it’s almost the sound of snowflakes falling onto snow-crust.”
Depicting both creation and destruction, the works are seamlessly dimensional, both lush and haunting.
Diamond has always been drawn to the reflections, ripples, and shimmering light cast on water, as well as its healing and mutable nature. Both as an artist and personally, she finds the ocean and all forms of water to be places for solace. She relates that her work here grew from a visit to an Oregon retreat viewing rushing streams and the shifting bubbles drawn from subterranean gasses.
Viewers will find much ambiguity in these works, where a fluid visual rush of mediums merge in images that depict both creation and destruction. In representing her own shifting perceptions of water, Diamond allows viewers to slip beneath a shifting surface to reach something far deeper, an ethereal and transcendent cosmology, from which she shapes work that transport and expand.
For Diamond – and for viewers – it is as if a stream of water represents the universe, or perhaps as if the universe itself was contained within that swirling water. The work contains elements of her own meditative experiences, and offer a spiritual succor that seems to radiate from the images themselves.
Each of the images exhibited in the gallery space is its own expansive experience – one that viewers can enter and find great beauty, and mysterious majesty. In short, Diamond lives up to her name, having shaped multi-faceted work that sparkles with a jeweled light.
Moorpark College Gallery is located in the Admin building at 7075 Campus Road in Moorpark.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and L. Aviva Diamond