About Gingras

Imaginative Realism | Illustration | Photography | Researcher of Visual Culture

Methodologies

     My artist methodology utilized in this site is of works amalgamates several influences such as contemporary and modern painting and drawing techniques, cultural contexts of French, Ukrainian and Metis, and theoretical frameworks of quantum physics, philosophy and post-modernism. 

     Predominately, the beings/creatures I portray are largely influenced through oral storytelling and publications of historical and current records. Other influences include art/archaeology/anthropolgy history and linguistics, and experience with curriculum developers, historians, teachers, and elders. 

     My work constructs stories of legendary beings/creatures through the imagined association of cellular memory, a state of my fusion of consciousness legacy and heritage lore systems of tricks and riddles, which have always been a metaphorical and allegorical way of thinking to self-actualization. Transmigrated Realms that is in the store section of this site, for example  depict Ti-Jean and Chi Jean, a pair of cousin trickster beings who are bequeathed a journey, in our living realm. Ti-Jean sought out to battle and slay the most maleficent of blue jays. While Chi Jean sought out to battle and slay the most maleficent of ravens, to prove their worth as tricksters.

     Muscles designed within the human and animal physique composes movement probabilities. Let’s say I wanted to create a human hybrid using an animal, or I wanted to create a human hybrid without a machine or animal hybrid with the machine. To make those consolidations possible is to imagine the musculature infrastructure of conceiving these beings/creatures, no matter how weird or colourful the spirit those beings/creatures may look. The inclusion of the creature’s imagined environment adds to the plausibility of their existence. During a fantasy art workshop in Kenosha, Wisconsin in April 2016, a mentor and friend, Jeff Miracola, fantasy artist and illustrator, taught me that trying to interpret my imagination did not always have to be controlled. He followed by articulating, “Sometimes being dictated by preconceived ideas of the imagination will not always allow ideas to emanate victories.” (Miracola, 2016) Therefore, applying intuitive, automatic application of the medium, opens possibilities for deeper imagined insights. 

     The images, drawings and paintings in this site originated by pondering human life and form into allegory then to imaginative realism. As a child, cartoons provided initial inspirations such as shows like, He-man, She-ra, Blackstar and Brave Starr produced by legendary Lou Scheimer, Thunder Cats created by Ted Tobin, Transformers, and Dragon Ball (Z) and today Dragon Ball Super. I would further watch bodybuilding documentaries, bodybuilding competitions and Bruce Lee and Kung Fu movies. My fascination lay within the physique expression to tell the story. 

     In some of my earlier works I used spheres and a tube-like line connecting through them to show sub conscious language. People were interpreting these as beads or rosaries and toy balls. I realized people were interpreting them based on their own aesthetic and cultural experiences rather than I wanted to explain and represent unseen communication. I realised at this time the sphere can be a welcomed tool in communicating my work to others in an unseen language but the how still confounded me. I was familiar with works of Norval Morriseau, his paintings and drawings depict lines of power, divided circles, movement, internal x-ray characters and spoke to 

communications and prophecy. These energy lines show the network and relations between all things, with the duality of all things of animate and inanimate forms. (Morrisseau pg. 51-57), I had also found these types of energy lines in comic books such as Spider-Man and Lou Scheimer productions. Spider-Man gets warned of danger when his Spider or Spidey senses go off. This is illustrated in the comic with energy lines protruding from his head. Norval’s “lines”, became influential for me in an attempt to use the sphere as intelligent form of language and communication. I modelled Norval’s technique in “line” because it was represented unseen communication within his artistic works and storytelling. In my works, twin spheres are side by side (sometimes translucent) with the sphere on the left being divided which symbolize a person with two or more heritages and the right sphere communicating to our internal and external bodies. The two spheres side by side, in total, is an abstract for the infinity symbol which can lead to many philosophical lessons and teachings. I had found a particular text referring to twin circles that were depicted side by side. In the published book, Red Sun, Gabriel Dumont, the Folk Hero (2017), there is reference to the possible origin of the infinity symbol used by the Métis in a form of identity, the quote reads. “An old Nakota, being cared for by Gabriel’s brother, Singer, came to the tipi and stood outside to stare at it. Unlike most tipis, it didn’t have any sacred, spiritual, or luck insignia painted on the outside. The old man got his brushes and painted two bulging circles, side by side. He told Singer that it meant: “Two circles. Métis trader wagons. and the Sun, for the two-culture people.” (Thompson, 1931). Lines that animate from my spheres speak to movement, neuro linguistics communication, sub-atomic communication and metaphysical communication of the spirit. 

     In this exhibit, influences led me to inquire of how to evolve the muscular form in character and environmental atmosphere by borrowing the systems related to the imaginative realism definition, to paint that which does not exist. My optimum interest in this body of work is entrenched in the muscular physique expanded into the metaphorical/allegorical concepts and transformations of humans and animal. I conceptualize an unwrapping of our bodies’ laminations down to its sub-atomic level, from this actualized self-awareness transformations to the organic structure into its macro and microcosm. Bodies can metaphorically speak to nature itself. The cardiovascular systems that transmit blood to parts of our body are similar to the tributaries, rivers and inlets on earth, such as Aristotle states that “the seeds of all things have a moist nature and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.” (Aristotle, Pg. 694), our human nervous system mobilizes in the expanse subatomic space of our bodies and synaptic transmissions travel along Axons. (McArdle, William D, Katch, Frank I, Katch Victor L. 1996). When those transmissions occur, they are protected by the myelin sheath, the bioelectric intelligent lightning bolts within the body. This performance is very similar to the communicating bolts of lightning that shoot from the landscape directly towards the meteorological lining of our earth and its opposite way or order. The earth and meteorological lining act adjacent to the Myelin Sheath. Within that sheath we occupy space, travel and live our lives in the way the sub atomic particles in the axons perform. One could even look outward and see that our earth and moon functions and layers behave and are comparable to the layers and functions of an atom and its electron(s). From the painting Neuro Linguistics Programming in this site from the store section articulates imaginative realism in a visual allegory of the neuron cell. The complex connectedness of body, mind and feeling in the rhythm of life, such as depicted in a neuron cell, for example, provides a visual understanding of imaginative realism applied to my work and starts to indentify as a unified voice for the unseen micro and allegorical dynamics. 

     Perceptions through life drawing of the physique do not just naturally represent the body exterior, but rather with some science, including our imaginative participations, it helps us form communication that the physique can speak for. Neuro Linguistics Programming encompasses the three most influential components involved in producing human experience: neurology, language and programming. The neurological system regulates how our body functions. Language determines how we interface and communicate with other people and our programming determines the kinds of models of the world we create. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) describes the fundamental dynamics between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how their interplay affects our body and behaviour (programming). (Dilts, Robert B. 2016). 

     The imaginative impact on my drawings and paintings are difficult to explain with scientific accuracy. Indigenous cultural context teaches animated spirit energy, this is why some images have enchantment ways of implementing pleasure, inspiration, aggravation or awkwardness with (NLP) the probability of informing totality is plausible. Harmonizing the physique, forming laminations of metaphor and or allegorical conveyance, seeds the communication of emotion. In its subject, the aesthetic manipulation of movement, rhythms, atmospheric environment, tensions, similarities, colours, textures, and contrasts, allows the observer to have the opportunity to spawn origin in kinetic energy and new sensibilities of learning. (McArdle, William D, Katch, Frank I, Katch Victor L, 1996). Imaginative Realism aspirations with alliance I designed to break my limits of obedience in linear rational into a higher conglomerate of dimensional nuances.

References