ASCENSIO: AETERNA MULTIVERSE, Liberté Grace, 2023, Lambda C-type Photograph
ASCENSIO: AETERNA MULTIVERSE (2023) is a new work exploring timelessness and the fall of power.
What if time did not exist and we could access everything that we are and were — before, during, and after birth — even death?
ASCENSIO: AETERNA MULTIVERSE imagines a fantasy of total freedom beyond human consciousness — the experience of waking up from being human and becoming an awakened and enlightened multi-dimensional being — unlimited by time, space, or physical reality.
In the void of infinite potentials, a fictional persona called 'ASCENSIO', explores its infinite inner universe and multi-dimensional nature; realising the unlimited nature of its soul.
Shot in France with award-winning performer, Kate Sherman, ASCENSIO: AETERNA MULTIVERSE is a singular work by contemporary artist Liberté Grace, whose art practice explores the true meaning of freedom, through new consciousness perspectives. With fantasy and imagination, new realities are created that allow for old paradigms and beliefs to be alchemised and expanded into new constructs and ways of being.
Grace previously shot art video installation The Perfect Boy Myth, which was selected to showcase at Art Basel (2015) and won a National Emerging Art Prize (2013), starring performance-maker, Kate Sherman.
ASCENSIO: AETERNA MULTIVERSE is a multidimensional alternative reality in which the character of the 'Orator' from The Perfect Boy Myth, dreams beyond time into a new reality of self-compassion for its 'bad deeds' and discovers freedom beyond its former power-driven acts.
Throughout the ages, the colour gold has been used as a symbol of wealth and status. In many ancient civilisations, including Egypt, Greece, and Rome, gold was reserved for royalty, nobility, and religious purposes. Over time, the colour of gold was often considered to be a symbol of power.
However, in looking beyond the societal concepts that have defined gold — within nature, gold can also be seen in the sun and as the pure light that falls and supports the flowering and growth of life in all its forms. It is the glint within honey, the iridescent halo surrounding flowers, mountains, the crest of ocean waves... even the romantic glow upon a lover's cheek. The truth is, the colour of gold is a neutral part of creation that has no real meaning, until we project the meaning we choose upon it.
Within the ASCENSIO series, gold represents the distillation of wisdom — the honey of the soul. Within the golden kaleidoscope of Ascensio's inner being — a grand dance within its soul-self continues throughout many internal "rooms" — as the soul continues to fall in love with itself and every single story and experience that has brought it wisdom.
Beyond judgements of light and dark, right and wrong, the soul, in its infinite compassion for itself, and all its creative forms and acts of consciousness, and as an expression of true love and acceptance of all it has been, distills each of its experiences — both light and dark — into its own ever-expanding realisation of itself.
As the human connects to its soul's full awareness of itself as infinite and in a constant state of expansion and creation; there is no longer the need to play in the games of saviour, abuser or victim, once all the gifts, love and abundance that it perceived to be outside of itself, is finally found - within.
In ending all wars within and outside of itself, through the never-ending and unconditional compassion of the soul that needs nothing but to know that all solutions can be found inside its own creations, then, and only then, can one know true freedom and reclaim the gold — the true treasure — within oneself.