reviews

Lyz Bly
Cleveland Free Times
Beyond the Comfort Zone
November 30–December 6, 2005

"Sarah Chokyi Bauer's (Untitled) Refuge is a digital video of the artist performing the Buddhist practice of "taking refuge" through the accumulation of 100,000 physical acts. Viewers watch as the artist falls to her knees, slides forward, raises her arms, stands, and repeats the action again and again. The piece's ceremonial nature is underscored by Untitled (Twilight –Dawn ) an enormous field of miniature still photos of Chokyi Bauer performing the same ritual. The photographs are almost as beautiful as the physical accomplishments they depict."

Carla Ruth Dunham
artUS
issue 8
may/june 2005

"...Bauer prostrates herself daily in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Artistically Bauer films her daily devotions, makes selections from the resulting stills, and assembles the now-isolated gestures into large diptych and triptych mosaics. Nestled among these many gestures, her original act of devotion disappears into a swath of light and shadow, at once affecting Muybridge and a minimalist grid.

Enlightenment emerges from process, the daily prayer, repeated centering. To interrupt that ritual is to reexamine it. By parsing her religious practice as slices then mocking it into a grid, Bauer dismantles its totality and suggests that clarity of any sort, be it religious or artistic, arises only accidentally."

Doug Hanson
Stating of the art
Above Is Below exhibition review
StarTribune
January 7, 2005

"The recognizable image of Bauer in each tiny image dissapears even at a short distance, and the overall surface transforms into an appealing pattern dictated by the dark or bright lighting or by clothing..."
"This is a nice visual evocation of the Buddhist tenet of transcendence or loss of self..."

Cynde Randall
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Magazine
November/December 2004

"Bauer...[has] created significant bodies of work out of long-term and meticulously defined daily practice...Bauer has committed her life as an artist to Tibetan Buddhism, its spiritual path emphasizing selflessness or emptiness, compassion, and altruism toward others. Buddhist thought and practice perceives the interdependent nature of phenomena—that is, the dependently orginated nature of all things."

"Bauer's giant grids level any sense of hierarchy, relinquishing the self. Considered at a distance, her prostrations to the Buddha [buddhanature] cease to hold figurative meaning, undulating instead with luminous patterns of light and form. Through this work, Bauer creates an opportunity to transcend the ego of the artist or the viewer and to contemplate an abstract web of meaning: the in-betweenness or emptiness of the universe."

Michelle Grabner
Artist, Critic, Gallery Owner, Writer
2003

"Bauer's projects...are much more than objective accounts of her completion of...Ngondro. These works also reflect urgent contemporary cultural conditions, the most apparent being the intersection between an ancient spiritual tradition and our contemporary digital coordinates. Bauer's project is brave. She does not set out to engage in art world gamesmanship. Instead she seeks fulfillment, transcendence and insight into 'the absolute nature of things.'"