Nila Onda is an award winning photographer and filmmaker living in New York City.
Through my practice I aspire to expand the scope of perceived reality and reveal a world that transcends ordinary experience.
Over the course of two decades I have crafted a personal iconography defined by emotive language, cinematic storytelling and immersive abstractions. I construct expansive narratives evolving through recurrent themes of primal connections, metamorphosis, anthropomorphic nature, encounters with mystery and lucid dreams.
In the pursuit of essence, I engage with the pure act of feeling as a vital thread to a universal language, a pathway to inner depths and subliminal currents operating beneath the surface.
A vast spectrum of aesthetics and cultural histories resonates throughout. Eclectic elements from film genre, global art, Native traditions and Eastern philosophy blend into a nuanced synthesis giving expression to images that engage the senses and elicit wonder while sparking profound insights.
An Encounter with Mystery
Interalia Magazine, Interview July 2021 - Excerpts
Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?Nila Onda: I come from a traditional photography and film background. I developed a passion for photography through my love for cinema and visual storytelling. I was also a precocious abstract artist. It’s my spontaneous mode of expression. I consciously set out to depict the fundamental forces in action and their interplay. I found freedom in abstraction.
My professional background is in documentary and news as a camera operator and in education, as a photography and film production lecturer.
RB: Have there been any particular influences to your art practice?
NO: My influences extend across a large spectrum of arts, sciences and life encounters with people and cultures – but music has had the most significant role. Among all art forms music is the most abstract and closely related to mathematics. John Coltrane elegantly illustrated this connection in the essay Music and Geometry and in a complex diagram known as Circle of Tones. Jazz has had an extraordinary impact on my early neuroplasticity. It shaped the way I think.
As I mentioned my photographic language originates from cinema but it expands beyond, blurring the line between photography and purely abstract art. Throughout my practice I have experimented with multiple and diverse genre aesthetics. The influence of film noir is particularly evident in my documentary, architectural and botanical work rendered in dramatic chiaroscuro and dominated by negative space. While some of my portraiture reinvents screen archetypes referencing the joie de vivre of the nouvelle vague mixed with a touch of surrealism. I attempt to capture lyrical moments, psychological action.
In photography specifically I relate to the spontaneous approach of Cartier-Bresson. The synesthetic dance of Roy DeCarava’s visual music also strongly resonates with me.
RB: What is the underlying focus of your work?
NO: I think of creativity as a primal impulse, a driving force of life. Curiosity is the spark that ignites a relentless quest, a desire to explore ideas, processes, materials, aesthetics and technology.
The process originates from an encounter with mystery, a boundless space where I’m in touch with subtle energies and the intrinsic beauty of all things. It can be a contemplative moment, or visceral journey through the underbelly of the self in search of paths to transcendence, or an adventure of discovery through imaginary realms. It’s an intuitive, spontaneous and unpredictable flow. It’s a moment of tangible connection with the whole.
My thoughts are perfectly expressed by Jerry Uelsmann: “The role of the artist is not to resolve life’s mysteries, but to deepen them.”
RB: Your artworks create a vision of an interconnected system, between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, as well as between science and mysticism. Can you say more about your interest in quantum physics, Zen and Eastern philosophy?
NO: Ideas that resonate with us are a self-reflection. There is an essential elegance and poetic lyricism in Eastern philosophy that I strongly respond to. There is also playfulness, irreverence, humor and a profound sense of mystery. Above all I relate to its approach as system philosophy. This is where Eastern mysticism and quantum physics converge, in the search for a unified field theory. System thinking looks at connections, relationships, patterns, processes. Constant change is the primary attribute of the Tao. Yin and Yang are interdependent forces engaged in a generative process of interaction: the flux of life. My narratives follow the same principles, they are driven by the dynamic tension and interplay of opposite forces.
A key element that emerges in my practice is the principle of Yugen, a concept found in Zen aesthetics and philosophy that can be translated as mysterious profundity. I am also particularly intrigued by the monastic art practice of Splashed ink techniques and the idea of ‘aesthetics of accidents’.
RB: In Fritjof Capra’s and Pier Luigi Luisi’s book The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (2014), they state that an “understanding of life begins with the understanding of patterns”. How does this statement resonate with you and your work?
NO: Patterns are repeated configurations that emerge from mapping relationships. From clusters of stars to the DNA double helix, patterns permeate everything. They are the primordial organizing principles of the Universe. Networks embedded within networks forming the web of life.
Geometric configurations have been represented in art across cultures to express abstract concepts and mystical ideas like infinity, the cyclical nature of life, transformation and enlightenment. In music they are manifested in rhythm, harmonies, scales, tones and intervals. They are also recurring elements in my practice. My ongoing project Abstract Anatomies investigates modes of patterns interaction. The symbolic language of patterns seems to reveal the inner workings of life. It triggers an instinctive reaction of connection with the whole and induces a strong aesthetic response, an experience of beauty.
“Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.”Benoit Mandelbrot
RB: What projects are you currently working on or have coming up in the future?
NO: Luminous Gardens Is a long term ongoing project I began in 2018.
I worked from different locations in North America and the Caribbean utilizing local flora and marine elements. I created small scale underwater environments entirely from natural components. They are photographed in sunlight against hand painted backgrounds. The process is simple and organic. Everything is achieved in camera, nothing has been altered in post-production. The result is a series of otherworldly, unreal photographs that offer a vision of the natural world as a realm of enchantment. They are transient moments of unfolding beauty, meditations on the nature of impermanence. Only consciously acknowledging impermanence and our own mortality we will experience life’s depth and intensity to the fullest.