January 2008
Damon Belanger
Belmont, CA
Damon@damonbelanger.com
www.damonbelanger.com
ARTIST STATEMENT
My Death�s Head series of paintings explores concepts of death, its impact on how we live and ultimately, how we deal with regret. I have created a body of work dealing with different aspects of the subject because I was inspired by the Mexican holiday D�a de los Muertos or Day of the Dead and other celebrations of death. I became interested in how our distance from death, time-wise and experience-wise, affects our day-to-day lives.
Inspired by D�a de los Muertos, I have created symbolic and humorous totems and scenes to remind the viewer about death because sometimes we forget. Drawing from imagery of D�a de los Muertos celebrations and my own cartoon imagery, I represent death as a meaningful part of life and as motivation for living a more fulfilling life. Unlike the holiday, which is a time for honoring deceased loved ones and acknowledging death as a new beginning, my body of work is intended to invoke a more personal reflection of mortality.
In Mazatlan Death Project, the teddy bears in all their innocence represent us, the living. We live our daily lives thinking we are free, free to do as we wish, free to say what we want. In reality, we are all chained by our fears of death. Consequently, this fear negatively affects our relationships and actions. Like D�a de los Muertos, we should not only reflect on our past loved ones, but we should also learn from them. We should live more freely and purposefully and take the time to walk on that beach that is just within reach.
