SANDRA LOUISE DYAS

TANGLED UP IN TIME:

A RETROSPECTIVE

SANDRA LOUISE DYAS

I am an artist, educator and published author living in Iowa City, Iowa. I grew up on a farm in Eastern Iowa and acknowledge that this particular landscape has deeply informed who I am. My work centers on the theme of what home is and how it shapes us. I have always been deeply interested in trying to understand the relationships formed between people and landscape. I am struck by how humans develop incredibly deep roots and attachments to the landscape. My artwork comes out of my own experience as a woman who has lived her entire life in Iowa.

For almost forty years, my artwork has been directly and indirectly about my life. I use cameras to better understand the world and to capture my surroundings, both people and place. My creative practice is personally motivated, intuitive and interconnected by a sense of place, both physical and emotional. Going below the surface of what we physically see and finding beauty in the everyday is what I am looking for when making images. There is both beauty and deep sadness in the passage of time. I look for images that speak to the human condition and evoke messages of both hope and hopelessness.

My obsession has always been with the mysterious nature of time, the impermanence of life, its beauty and its sadness. Photographs contain both time and memories inside of them. A photograph can hold a magical power akin to music. Like music, images that move beyond the mere documentation of a subject or thing have a power within them that is unexplainable; they are a reminder that we all will die. The writer and critic, Susan Sontag said:

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

I have come to understand that what attracts me to an object, person, place is what the Japanese call mono on aware. This is an important concept of Japanese aesthetics that can be translated as ‘the pathos of things”. Nothing is permanent; everything is constantly changing, being. Fleeting moments of time, of stillness in a photograph or in a film, bring about feelings of melancholy and sorrow but also makes me feel more closely in tune with living life.

Photography and video are my mediums of choice for exploring the impermanence of life. Cameras record what is in front of the lens but only show us a fraction of a second of their interpretation. The frame includes and excludes. I see everything around me as potential for creating art. It is how you see and how you listen.