For more than forty years, Gary Smaby’s artistic eye has
peered through a camera lens; capturing memorable images that run the gamut
from classic portraiture to experimental new media. He has trained his lens on
an eclectic range of subjects: from legendary rock stars and Nobel laureates to
breathtaking landscapes from the Himalaya to the Serengeti. His acclaimed body
of work has been variously featured on gallery walls, album jackets, as well on
the web and in publications like The New
Yorker.
Over that same span, Smaby has also been an oft-quoted
observer at the leading edge of Western science and technology, as well as an
ardent practitioner of the Eastern contemplative science of meditation. His
latest work is a fusion of these oppositional influences; inspired by a
methodology for intellectual inquiry that is surprisingly favored by both
ancient Buddhist monks and contemporary quantum physicists when pondering
metaphysical phenomena that can neither be seen nor experimentally confirmed. Smaby used this shared technique, called the thought experiment, to artfully blend three divergent and
uniquely personal mind streams: his
insightful understanding of contemporary science, his direct experience with
Raja Yoga and Zen meditation and his artistic gift for visual
improvisation.
For his thought experiments, Smaby previsualized how ordinary, every-day things might appear if the
quantum uncertainty theorized by particle physicists at extremes of the
infinitesimally tiny and unimaginably galactic were to prevail at the
macrocosmic scale we call reality. In other words, how might our
perception of ordinary things be altered if the ‘immutable’ laws of Newton and
Einstein are indeed as impermanent and illusionary as professed by Buddhist scholars
for millennia?
