Chrysalis is a nonprofit California corporation formed to create and distribute creative work.
The purpose of Chrysalis is to use visual and other media to inspire hope and arouse a strong desire for personal and social change.
Images have great power in our lives. They are like mental “coathooks”; they capture, shape and lead our attention. And where our attention goes, our lives tend to follow.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of images relentlessly flooding into our imagination every day are shallow, toxic and violent. Scientists have recently determined that by the time a child in America reaches the age of 18, he or she will have seen over 14,000 images of murder. This is not by accident. As people with things to sell compete ever more desperately for our attention, they are driven to ever more sensational and shocking ways to seize and hold it.
It was not always like this. Images began as expressions of the sacred. They were created by people who were trying to express the deepest truths about things as they felt and understood them, and about our relation to realities larger than ourselves. By making images, they could share with each other their sense of what was most important.
The good news is that such images and symbols can still lead us toward the deepest and best in ourselves. Symbols bring what is beyond us into the “retail level” of daily life, and remind us that we are connected to truths deeper and wider than immediate circumstance. And our spirit needs that connection no less than our body needs food.
For some, that connection comes through the ancient images of traditional religions. But for many, those images no longer carry the power they once did. They have become disconnected from their original force and meaning, disconnected from our daily life, and at their worst, rallying cries for division and violence.
We want to be a link in that long chain of people who have made images that kept hope and spirit alive for one more generation.