Have you ever thought to visualize your consciousness?
It was this question that led digital hyper-collage artist, Ashley Christudasen, to commence his first serious work of Art, a process comprising 80 layered images unified on a single canvas. He had no intention of becoming an Artist, yet a fascination with symmetry, Spirituality, abstraction and layering set him on an exploratory journey that continues to this day, 13 years later.
The creative process to Ashley is an act of emptying the mind, detaching from the woes of daily life, and getting in touch with his love and reverence for the profound. In addition to Photoshop, Ashley experiments with DeepDream software – a computer vision program that uses algorithms to give images a dream-like hallucinogenic appearance. Layering hundreds of these textured images upon each other, each image loses its original form to become something new. If we liken each layer to a different iteration of the Ego, it is their simultaneous dissolution and transformation that culminates in a unified vision of Consciousness. It is this search for Oneness that fuels his creative endeavors.
His works are continuously evolving, with certain pieces having been through more than 30 ‘incarnations’ over the years, each time taking on new meaning and form, yet retaining their roots. He likens this process to the reincarnation of the soul, and a testament to the interconnectedness of all Life.
Though they often feature religious iconography, his artworks do not ascribe to a particular belief system. Rather, Ashley attempts to show that we can befriend all religious deities: that no one is more important than the other – that all are in fact helping us find our way to the Divine, to a sense of Oneness. They are a visual representation of a desire to know the unimaginable, to taste the unquantifiable, and to touch the ineffable – in its many forms.
For Ashley, Art exists within before it is manifested onto a canvas. It is an expression of Consciousness through the 5 senses. As such, he believes that Art has the potential to awaken an individual to his or her true nature by being a window into what lies within.
Ashley Christudason’s collection of artworks not only exemplify his own awakening and spiritual connection, but are a gateway to such explorations for anyone who encounters them, for anyone who has ever wondered: is this all there is?
IG : @artist_jungle_eye