Improvised Installations (2014-2018)
Everything You Need Is Already Here (2014)
A solo exhibition exploring repetition, desire and impermanence
January 17 - February 17, 2014
Heaven Gallery (Chicago), in conjunction with BOLT Residency
"Everything You Need Is Already Here" explores the spiritual predicament of desire, the presence of impermanence in everyday life and the possibility of responding to it with wonder and play, as opposed to anxiety.
Stacia Yeapanis highlights the nature of impermanence in an installation that only lasts the length of the exhibition. Everything You Need Is Already Here is inspired by the sites and relics of the human pursuit of a spiritual life—shrines and altars, mandalas, rock gardens and cairns, stupas, rosary beads, icons. The thousands of individual components, which will be reconfigured in future installations, are byproducts of the artist’s private meditation practice. The repeated gesture of coiling, winding, rolling easily-accessible materials, which results in an accumulation of empty centers, becomes an embodied metaphor for presence. Yeapanis chooses both manufactured goods and collected detritus of her life as an artist, a consumer, a cultural participant and a waitress, because these materials represent an acceptance and engagement with what is, rather than a striving towards what should/could be.
The apparent contradiction between the mass-media materials and the spiritual practice that generates the individual parts of the whole is an illusion. The only place a spiritual life exists is wherever we are. Every moment, every nook and cranny of our public identities and private histories, every manifestation of our striving and longing is an opportunity to fully be alive. The artist’s embodied meditation and the viewer’s visual contemplation are intimately connected; both are sensory experiences of repetition that can transform anxiety about impermanence, uncertainty and imperfection into curiosity about the mystery of what’s actually here.