My images in the 121 Restaurant Art Show are the latest portion of my long-running series, entitled Self-Portrait minus Self. Each image contains a human shadow, a surreptitious reminder of the artist’s ineradicable presence in the work. The shadow also signifies the ongoing dialogue between the polarities of aesthetics and of everyday experience, such as light / dark, presence / absence, and object /silhouette. It is in the conversations between such opposites where art resides, indeed, such conversations are where it is generated.

My art also owes a nod of thanks to Jung’s belief in the necessity of shadow to clarify what is seemingly illuminated, to Robert Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow and its insistence that light and shadow are linked and permanent features of all human consciousness, and to my father, Alfred Gordon, a lighting expert and photographer, whose fascination with brightening the darkness inspired my own creativity.