Brian Sweeney

About the Artist
In Paradise Road Sweeney offers twelve takes on paradise, twelve sketches maybe, twelve angles - a calendar. The landscape is constantly changing, forever rolling by. His photographs are taken in the quick of work and travel. He's on the road to somewhere, which is the same as nowhere. The journey is the destination and sometimes that just feels like paradise. You can't look at Sweeney's photos in Paradise Road and find paradise in and of itself. Instead, they carefully send you on your way, deflecting any pretense of essentiality.

As we sense from his images, the road to paradise is self-constructed, a journey undertaken alone to a resting place both full of meaning and blessedly arbitrary. They don't give a complete picture or make a grand statement, because Sweeney's view, even when looking straight on, is metaphorically out the corner of his eye, as if glimpsing something through something else, something hinted at, something that seems to come closer in the very act of drifting out of reach.

Taking off or touching down, roving between here and there, camera chattering away, Sweeney has become a restless diarist of the unremitting moment. All photographs have that characteristic of course: a moment snatched from time. But his eye pursues this quality as an unashamedly spiritual effect. His photos are like meditations. They're like prayers. A friend described them as conversations with God. I like the way that's put. But there's also something at work here that looks beyond God.

In every glimpse of paradise that Sweeney affords us is its antipode, a shadow, a lingering doubt. As the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna discerned, each thing always already relies on another to come into focus. In this way, all things lack essence and are empty. Not unreal, but empty. And along these lines he argued that samsara (the world) and nirvana (paradise) are the same. "Whatever is the limit of nirvana," he says, "That is the limit of samsara. There is not the slightest difference between them". This is the revelation of Sweeney's photographs in Paradise Road. Trading in opposites - down here or up there, art or commerce, banal or profound, edge or center - oppositions fall away. In the process we get a glimpse of the world in splendor, paradise on earth: never attained and never lost.

Stuart McKenzie is a New Zealand playwright and filmmaker. He has degrees in comparative religion and has written widely about the visual arts.