"Really it is good that you disconnected from your center!"

         Dr. Yogeesh Acharya, 1989
 
 

Games are a depiction of the arrival to a place and a time in one’s life where a critical move is inevitable. In this moment, there are all the givens and a random choice out of these givens will result in the rearrangement of all the others, and therefore change one’s course. Nothing is gained or lost. It is simply rearranged.

         Eileen Shahbazian, June 1997
 

Critical Comment:

Learning to know oneself is a risky business and in a culture which encourages self-deception through round the clock image management, the job is particularly fraught with peril.

Sculptor Eileen Shahbazian grew up in Beirut, Lebanon and now lives in Orange County, home of fantasy communities and Trojan horse ideologies of empowerment through wealth. It is here that she has embarked on the treacherous course of self-knowledge in her art, clearing hurdles of unrealistic cultural obligations and empty materialisms in order to intuitively realize a few patently solid, inner truths. The path, she explains, can take you to your center and yet it assures nothing. The journey is all there is.

The logic hardly constitutes a lure for the Prozac nation that expects rapid results of personal transformation and certainly will allude the hip, young artist who wants the big bucks NOW. But even the most skeptical of art pros still believe the stuff they make is, in some small way, a product of self-knowledge and if you press them, might admit the status of the mystical in their work. Shahbazian does not claim to be a mystic but she does willingly grant the desire to seek "pure being" in the production of her bronze cast sculpture.
 
Again, you backtrack and say "Pure being." What’s that?" Words are elusive as mere abstract signs. Shahbazian succeeds in manifesting the idea concretely, inspired by Yogeesh Acharya’s Mahavir Jain teachings of non-violence: Simple geometric containers, streamlined boxes and board games infer fundamental psychic processes; minimalist organic shapes reached the epitome of their organic form. Pure being, here without the European philosopher’s hyperbolizing "B," is the fact of existential interconnectivity. "Bliss" defines the core of human effort. Struggle is nowhere to be found. Again, a tall order for suffering artists and tired activists in the world. No wonder Marx was suspect of religion.

Then again, from the Jain perspective of the female renunciate, Shahbazian’s intimate bronze works speak frankly of nothing more than a spiritual contest with artifacts of an ego-centric, warring, rationalistic regime of consciousness. In SHAVINGS (1997), she carefully fills her test-tube like containers with human hair, pencil shards, and steel wool – elemental droppings from our bodies working, slaving, wasting away for the false masters of the lab we call "the world." There was a time when Shahbazian  looked to industrial product design as a key to unlocking mystery’s door. Now she poetically casts the numinous contradictions of being human (before the introduction of the cyborg) in concise units of games and experiments made of bronze.

The elegant irony is not lost on the artist. Her need to capture perfection like a true-blue industrialist has asserted the primacy of bronze. After all, it’s a quiet material given to comparatively serene practices (unlike welding), and better than steel, it doesn’t rust. Even still, as a pre-industrial substance that insists upon masquerading its original form, bronze casting is, for Shahbazian, the perfect entry into self-deception and ultimately, the means of re-invigorating self-knowledge over and over again.

        M.A. Greenstein
        Los Angeles, June 1997

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