If you enter the Fowler Museum over the next month and a half,
you will be blessed by the Dalai Lama.
Starting July 5, the UCLA museum will be home to a pair of
events focused on the principles of the Buddhist religious leader.
The High Noon Film Series will showcase five films revolving around
issues of Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
The films will serve as a companion to the sensory-based art
exhibition “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai
Lama,” which begins with His Holiness’ videotaped
blessing,
Artists participating in the exhibition and film series hope to
share stories about the Dalai Lama and about Tibetan Buddhism, but
also to expose the idea of Buddhism to a global community.
“I like to say that the show is not a Buddhist show but it
truly is about universal concepts,” said Randy Jane Robinson,
curator of “The Missing Peace.”
The exhibition is broken up into 10 thematic categories,
including empathy, compassion, transformation, unity and
impermanence.
Rosemary Rawcliffe, a British-born artist with pieces in both
the exhibition and film series, hopes that her art will reach
beyond a selective community.
“I looked at this culture and said, “˜How can I do
something that might effect change?’ And the only way I know
is to make something that will change people’s hearts,”
Rawcliffe said.
The artist believes that if the global community loses the
ability to remain compassionate and caring in the face of such
atrocities as those that the people of Tibet face, then a piece of
humanity will be lost.
Rawcliffe’s film “Women of Tibet: Gyalum Chemo
““ The Great Mother,” the fourth in the High Noon Film
Series, will be shown on Aug. 16.
The film explores the life of Dekyi Tsering, the mother of the
current Dalai Lama. The story also examines the great mother
archetype and comes to a conclusion that this model is represented
not only by women: Men, too, can be great mothers.
Tsering’s work demonstrates that the principles embodied
by the Dalai Lama are universal.
“The Dalai Lama carries the great mother archetype in all
he does in embracing and encouraging and nurturing,”
Rawcliffe said.
“Nelson Mandela carries that archetype by bringing peace
and forgiveness to South Africa. Martin Luther King carried it in
his encouragement of human rights. Many great men are carrying the
great mother archetype.”
The concept of the great mother is a unifying principle of
Rawcliffe’s work. Though her work in the exhibition and the
High Noon Film Series was produced 20 years apart, each creation
explores the greatness of spiritual women.
“I think all the work I’ve done for my whole career
has come out of the idea that we’ve forgotten who women are.
If we do nothing else on the planet, we do one very important job
that no one else can do,” she said.
Rawcliffe’s interest in women and birth also comes through
in her representation of a counterintuitive juxtaposition that she
believes exists between the peace of the womb and the madness of
the world.
“We terrorize ourselves with urban traffic and pollution
and terrorism, and yet, in the womb, there’s this promise of
peace,” she said.
“There is a promise of all these wonderful things that a
full and rich life is supposed to have: growing up and playing and
love and marriage and the whole cyclical nature of life.”
Because the Dalai Lama lives in exile, because not every
government is founded on the principles of peace and non-violence,
and because the world is not a perfect place, the exhibition at the
Fowler is meant to educate and inspire, but also to heal.
With works including a lullaby, video blessings and other
multi-media presentations, the exhibition experience attempts to
create an atmosphere of serenity and peace, which contributors and
organizers hope will extend to the world beyond the film screen or
museum floor.
“Hopefully people will experience it on many levels,
certainly intellectually, but also emotionally and in a collective
way to deepen their consciousness,” Robinson said.