The Spectra Suites

Between 1998 and 2006, Adi Da Samraj focused on camera-based imagery, creating a highly complex body of work (in both black-and-white and color) that now exceeds 60,000 images and a great many hours of videotape. The Spectra Suites, his latest book, is a consequence of his work from that great library. In these suites Adi Da Samraj combines digitally generated imagery with images he created using still and video cameras. To achieve each finished work he then meticulously crafts every detail by digital means. Each of the 10 Spectra Suites is based on one or more of his fundamental images--many of which are a powerful visual and philosophical complexity. These fundamental images are, for him, preliminary sketches. Each new image for the suites began as his response to a number of his own photographs collected on a nearby wall as a general representation of his subject. Rather than projecting them as a photorealist might, Adi Da Samraj used his photographs as a kind of "focus of recollection and presence" to bring the often immovable, disparate, complex, and multiple subjects of his art into the interior of his working studio. Adi Da Samraj has said that his intention as an artist is to visually communicate the Truth of Reality Itself by "allowing Reality to manifest Itself." This is the first major full-color monograph on this spiritual master's art, and is published in conjunction with a showing of his work at the Venice Biennale, June-November, 2007.