July 15th saw the opening of The Spirits of the Forest, an exhibition of pieces by Hermes Kondor at the New Life Gallery within the campus of St. Elizabeth’s University.
As a photographer / artist, Hermes is constantly extending his range of approaches and techniques, with a number of his recent exhibitions focusing on the use of AI tools – largely Midjourney, I believe I’m correct in saying – and also on his macro compositional work featuring still life on the smallest of scales. It is for its richness, range and compositional quality that I’ve come to deeply admire and appreciate Hermes’ work, and it is always a pleasure to cover one of his exhibitions in these pages.
Comprising 27 images split across the three levels of the gallery – all of which are connected via an elevator rather than stairs – The Spirits of the Forest represents a collection of his more recent explorations with the use of AI generated pieces combined with other digital photographic techniques to offer some marvellously expressive pieces on the theme of “hidden guardians” – spirits, sprites and minor deities once thought to inhabit and protect forests and woodlands.
Such beliefs – and the worship of trees themselves – was common among many cultures, east and west, and often linked with ideas of fertility, renewal / rebirth and the cycle of life. The link to fertility tended to lean many such spirits to be personified as female deities in most cultures, although there were male figures among them. Similarly, while most were considered benevolent and giving, some cultures did have more malevolent forest / tree spirits or at least have a number given to a more mischievous nature.
Within The Spirits of the Forest, Hermes appears to draw inspiration from the more western traditions of female woodland spirits, stirring in a touch of what might be fantasy elven leanings. How much of this is by design and how much is the result of the parameters given to his AI software is unclear, but the majority of spirits within the images appear to have strongly western European looks. Not that this is in any way a critique; the figures are not intended to be representative of specific tree deities, they are rather intended to springboard our imaginations into mental narratives on he nature of the spirits and trees featured within them – and possibly more besides.
For me, these deeply expressive images brought to mind a range of thoughts, from reflections on the nature of matriarchal religion and the argument put forward by Robert Graves that, within western European cultures, the multiple beliefs in female deities in all their forms – including those of the forest – are rooted in an ancient belief in a single “mother goddess” whom he called “The White Goddess”. mixed with this came reflections on how common artistic interpretations of the likes of Tolkien’s elves down the decades since the publication of Lord of the Rings may have played a role in how the AI tools producing the base images on which Hermes has built his finished pieces, all the way through to the sheer artistry of the displayed pieces and how each presents a world of mystical beauty which appears to sit just beyond our reach, but is nevertheless fully visible to the imagination.
Given such a rich mix of reactions, it should come as no surprise that I thoroughly recommend The Spirits of the Forest as a very worthy visit, forming as it does an exhibition of deeply captivating images all of which can be appreciated in their own right both as digital art and for their ability to offer a single-frame story, and which collectively can take the mind on a journey of expositional enquiry and thought.
SLurl Details
- New Life Gallery (Dark Dreamer, rated Adult)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 