[-empyre-] The Aura Project - Chrysanne Stathacos

[Chrysanne S]

The Aura
Project                                                              Chrysanne
Stathacos



>From 1997- 2017 I took over 1000 photographs of people while traveling
around the world. My intention has been to produce a body of work, The Aura
Project, which investigates the relationship between color and portraiture
beyond our usual definitions of race, gender, religion, and ethnicity.



The Aura Project includes portraits of sadhus and holy women by the Ganges
in Rishikesh, India, Tibetan refugees in the mountains of Dharamsala,
Buddhist monks and dancers in the hills of Kyoto, Sikh families in Long
Island and artists in New York, Germany and Canada. The biofeedback camera
registers and reads the thermal electrical touch from the sitter's hands,
which is transmitted into a small computer in the camera. This biofeedback
component of the camera from the hand plate to the camera release connected
me to the sitter and allowed for creative experimentation within the
process.



Since the Theosophists, Steiner, and Nikola Tesla there has been an
interest by artists and scientists to capture the "aura". Color theories
based on these spiritual/ scientific ideas and experiments, (including
Goethe) had a profound influence on the modernists in the early 20th
century, which formed the basis for how we look at and feel about color
today. These ideas influenced me to embark on this project one hundred
years later to investigate how our relationship to color has transformed
with new technologies.



Even a traditional camera’s ability to capture images that cannot be seen
by the human eye renders it somehow mystical. Photography’s skill at
exhibiting the presence of an object that is no longer immediately,
physically present—what French theorist Roland Barthes called a “temporal
hallucination”—produces another degree of “aura.”



The Aura Project refers to the unseen colors that we imagine are there, the
unconscious projections of our reactions to color. Historical art works
depicting halos emanating from the subjects’ heads fill museums, temples
and churches adding to our long-cherished belief that we can project light
from our bodies through our life energy. Science has proved these beliefs
true with the new technologies of diagnostic imaging machines.  The Aura
Project evens out the territory by dismantling the seen differences of
gender, ethnicity and race breaking through to the unseen values of light
and color.




Chrysanne Stathacos
chrysannex at gmail.com

chrysanne.ca
www.wishmachine.com
www.mommybysilasandstathacos.com
www.dglinitiatives.org
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