Art: A Woven Hoop of Caught Dreams by Ralph Maratta

Managing Shadows in a Mossy World

Myth, fable, poetry, and literature share an affinity with using nature as a setting for self-reflection, transformation, and epiphany. Endless landscapes yield endless metaphors, myriad signposts along the way. Vast deserts, coastal cliffs, and glacial mountain peaks are places of inspiration, and sometimes disconcerting lessons in size and scope. Yet, it is forests that conjure introspection and during a walk, I once found a message tied to a tree branch that said it most poignant. The note read, “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk in the woods.”

Dense tree canopies enhance the feeling of being in a self-contained sphere, and especially while walking alone, you become part the habitat. There’s shelter. There’s seclusion from the outside world, yet exposure to a world you clearly don’t control. Forests can be comforting and terrifying.

I’m recent to the Pacific North West. It is energizing to live in its prolific landscapes and a privilege to make this geography part of my everyday life. Without planning, the forests became my first photographic fixation in this region. Walking through the woods here is nothing short of stepping into a fairytale. It was the patterns, textures, and deep tones of the Hoh forest that first mesmerized me.

Forests write code for each dweller to decipher.

The portfolio, “Managing Shadows,” is my transcription.

RgM

A Mental Body of Unconscious Tendencies

Bewildering Apparitions of Past Actions Emerge

Grace In The Shadows

Managing Shadows In A Mossy World

Shining And Luminous Is The New Day

The Persecution Of Wisdom

The Joyous And Triumphant Return Of Wisdom

Where Memories Process And Linger

 Where The Faithful Meet The Divine

In the artist’s words:

Ralph Maratta, who works under the name 2Worlds, lives and works in Tacoma, Washington. A recent transplant from the New York City area, he credits a recent creative surge to the lifestyle change he expresses as “energizing.”

“I’m in a groove. Living in a vastly different, rugged, and raw landscape, being an outsider, unknown but for a handful of work colleagues, and in general feeling like a fish out of water, is a jolt to the core. For now, I’m exploiting the feeling and converting it to photographs.”

Maratta works in film and digital capture. Reared in the traditional darkroom, a place he says he transforms, he is skilled in black and white printmaking. “In the darkroom, I become laser-focused, slower, methodical, retentive, over-demanding, and perfectionist – all of the things I’m not in life!” Yet, if asked if he thinks film is the superior medium, he quickly replies, “I don’t get into that stuff, it would be like comparing watercolor to oil or something. Each medium is different with a different set of strengths and weaknesses. It all depends on what you want to convey, that’s all. At first, the darkroom influenced my digital printing, but now my digital processes affect how I approach the darkroom.”

He says music influences his photography most, citing that “it’s all there; tonal scale, contrast, brightness, darkness, rhythm, and melody.” The nature of aesthetics or aesthetic experience intrigues him most as he thinks art can trigger the subconscious and also tap something universal, like a collective unconscious. “I can work in different subject matters, styles, and photographic mediums, but running through all my imagery are ideas on connectivity, empty space, differing realities in a given moment, and the merging disciplines of modern science and spirituality.

When asked about what photography and the creative process means to him, he says, “For me, it’s less about the need or drive to create, like it is for many. Photography, for me, is a measurement of how I’m improving or growing. So, it’s a focus, my life’s work, and a bit of duty, albeit a labor of love.”

Maratta has been featured in several one-person shows and published in a variety of online publications. More of his work can be seen here: http://bit.ly/2sNaviw