“In our essential nature, we are made of light.”
Lama Rigzin Drolma, Dakini Elements retreat
Lama Rigzin Drolma, Dakini Elements retreat
The power of beauty to function as a window and a mirror of pure potential is the inspiration for fine art photographer Mahala Mazerov. Her art is a portal to encountering the boundless light of who we really are.
Mazerov first experienced this light in a near-death vision after a traumatic brain injury. She still remembers losing her hold on consciousness, looking down from a great height, and seeing her pale body on a hospital gurney below.
Instead of death overtaking her, the universe poured in. She witnessed images of astounding beauty. A booming voice insisted “You are not dying!” Mazerov returned to a physical body that felt cramped and too small for the radiance she’d experienced. She returned to a world she couldn’t comprehend, requiring years of rehabilitation.
Through it all, Mazerov kept her vision alive. She maintains an abiding belief in the healing agency of beauty. She became a Buddhist and her practices inform her desire, and her ability, to embrace conventional reality with spaciousness and compassion.
The simultaneous presence of radiance with awareness of deep pain is key to her art. The beauty in Mazerov’s work is a recognition of illumination and emptiness. It is an offering by and for those who insist on light when despair seems the inescapable path.
To reference her signature luminosity, Mazerov plays with scale, focus and light. To articulate her experience of an incandescent reality behind and beyond the world of appearances, she prints on translucent vellum and illuminates her images by hand-applying gold leaf.
Mazerov grows the flowers she photographs in her Santa Fe garden. Each carefully tended blossom unfolds in a relationship of reverence and communion. Every flower emanates the light of a deity.
Entering the images, and being enveloped by them, is an invitation to our essential nature and our inexhaustible source of invincible light.