Here’s the most recent evolution of my Senior Thesis for the Art major. No doubt it’ll be getting updated frequently while we’re on Winter Break, now that I have plenty of time to work, sit back, ponder, adjust, ponder some more, so on, and so forth.
———————————————————————————————————————————–
Acre of Bones
“…walk with Nature…see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity…”
~John Muir
This quote by John Muir speaks of life and mortality as shared by nature and its inhabitants. It also addresses his individual place and attitude in relation to his own mortality. This thesis body of work considers that relationship between the processes of nature and the mortality of its human inhabitants, how that relationship gives birth to individual efforts to understand and sometimes counter mortality, and how sacredness can be a lens through which to view nature and mortality. The work takes a biographical bent to consider the relationship of nature’s processes to the place of a human being on the life-death continuum. This biographical approach allows for the exploration of an interesting concern of the work: how an individual addresses their concerns and fears regarding absorption into death. To probe these explorations and concerns, Acre of Bones employs photography, assemblage, and time-based sculptural pieces that use natural and found materials. By using these media to portray an individual’s relationship with time and the physical land, this body of work compels viewers to ask, “How do I deal with my own mortality?”
Though a varied range of media is employed in this body of work, the common physical factors of symmetry and found or reclaimed materials unite the media into a cohesive body of work. Most pieces in this body of work employ some type of symmetry to echo and reference natural structures, earth cycles, and the symmetry of the human body.
Symmetry is perhaps most apparent within the photographs in this body of work. In the long field (autumn), two digital photographs are multiplied, edited, and sewn together over several vertical lines of symmetry to create a panorama. This places a lone person in an empty and dying landscape, amplifying their significance and insignificance in that setting, and presenting a contrast between the living and dying in the same vignette. The use of symmetry in the long field (autumn) is used to create a cohesive landscape in which the human figure is the imbalance; this imbalance speaks to the subject’s existence within (yet disconnect from) the physical landscape, where she is a fixture that will pass though the landscape continues. The use of symmetry in the long field (autumn) also creates a continuum on which the subject is a dot or a marker; visually, this illustrates the concept of a timeline on which a person holds a specific place. Celestial visual elements are also seen in the photographs: in the long field (autumn), star patterns emerge from the symmetry of corn stalks; the combination of a tractor’s tracks and a hay bale create a comet-like figure in the long field (summer). Unseen and unintended at the time of photographic capture, these cosmic visuals reference the idea of layers of control seen in the ant farms: structurally, they are set up to control the ants’ tunneling in a specific pattern, but though the ants may follow said pattern, there is nothing to keep them from forging their own path within the farms. They share creative control over their lives with a higher power – but do they even realize said higher power exists, and are they aware of its influence upon them?
Each photograph is displayed in a natural-stain wooden light-box, illuminated from behind. The finish of the light-boxes allows for aesthetic enhancement of the natural wood grain, which manifests in line and circle patterns, echoing the dot-on-continuum language of the photographs themselves, and also paralleling the patterns seen in the work’s ant farm series. The size, structure, and luminosity of the boxes are also significant: depending on box orientation, either the height or width of each box is the measurement of the average adult female height, referencing the photographs’ human subject. The box structure speaks the visual language of the simple ‘pine box’ coffin. The luminosity of the light-boxes references illuminated reliquaries or mausoleums, and also takes advantage of our ideas about the transience of light. Together, these three elements of size, structure, and luminosity effectively hearken to structures associated with human mortality.
Visually and conceptually, the photographic language of Acre of Bones is influenced by the photography of Fazal Sheikh (fazalsheikh.org). Two narrative bodies of his work are particularly referenced: Moksha and The Victor Weeps. In Moksha, particular attention is paid to photographing people in a way that emphasizes their solitariness in the photographic frame. This method creates a quiet landscape that encourages the viewer to reconsider minute photographic details: a wrinkled shawl that is perhaps never removed; a shadow stilled by the moment of photographic capture, reconsidered as a passing interaction between two transient entities. Sheikh’s photographs from The Victor Weeps address mortality and the passing of time in part through portraits of individuals with photographs of deceased friends and family members, and also through luminous portraits of the living keeping company with portraits of graves. This juxtaposition of a living person treasuring a relic of a bygone one creates an emotional space in which viewers must question how to deal with their own experiences with mortality.
Found materials and objects are also essential to Acre of Bones in referencing the natural landscape, and emphasizing the themes of collection, personal history, and growth and decay. In some cases, live or once-living media such as ants, plants, or local patches of ground are employed to present an occurring time-based piece of work. In the living sculptural pieces forgotten remembering 1, 2, and 3, contained ant colonies live and work around small golden boxes filled with significant found objects: a skeleton key, braided hemp, pieces of paper torn from an almanac, small flowers, a string of pearls, a dead fly, and other objects that could conjure an immediate emotional or memory response from a viewer. These pieces use symmetry, collection, and active life to explore the relationship between memory, time, geography, and mortality. In these works, an attempt is made to control the ants’ tunneling into symmetrical celestial patterns by imbedding food in the sand within the farms. Over time, the ants will surely seek out this food and tunnel over these patterns, but will likely also create tunnels and caverns of their own within the farms. This idea of tracks and layers of control ties with the themes of cosmos and paths also seen in the photographic elements of the work. These pieces employing living components are particularly influenced by the work of Damien Hirst, whose work also explores the theme of mortality using living or once-living animals. In In and Out of Love, Hirst created a time-based installation in which butterflies went through their entire life cycle in the gallery, hatching during the opening reception of the show, and dying shortly after accidentally adhering themselves to canvases covered in household gloss paint (wikipedia.com). This use of living creatures to illustrate an entire life cycle allows the viewer to directly experience mortality on a small scale, from start to finish.
Another piece that will explore the process of mortality is digging down, a performance art piece in which a local patch of ground will become home to a gradually-dug grave fit for an adult human. In this piece, the experience of a viewer seeing someone dig their own grave, inhabit and interact with the space, come out of it, and then leave the viewer alone with it, will cause the viewer to have a visceral reaction somewhat different from the one normally experienced when one encounters an open grave. The piece aims to encourage the viewer to interact with this emblem of mortality in a way other than dread or fear, though ultimately exists to interact with the grave, period, and to simply be aware of the feelings, memories, and reactions they personally experience in relation to the piece. When the time comes to refill and cover the hole, a jar containing objects given by viewers over the course of the piece will be buried at the bottom of the cavity, uniting the themes of memory, collection, land, and mortality in the filling of the grave. This motif of the ‘time capsule’, literally a ‘medicine or module against time,’ appears several times in Acre of Bones.
The time capsule in digging down is a sister piece to (i have) one year, a series of Mason jar capsules on a dilapidated wooden board. The title of the piece is threefold: it is a phrase often heard when someone knows their light is about to go out, it gives a deeper context to the twelve-count number of jars, and it also ties together the ideas of time and collection. In the style of Joseph Cornell’s sacred boxes and assemblage art (WebMusem, Paris, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell), (i have) one year uses objects and materials from nature to create a relic jar collection that concerns itself with accumulating substances from the earth. This is done as a way to guard against the loss of memory to time, and as personal ballast against the tide of mortality that recollects people to the earth.
In Moksha, Fazal Sheikh explains that moksha is “…a release…into a higher state” which “involves the loss of one’s individual identity and absorption into the…absolute.” Conversely, Acre of Bones explores a more Westernized understanding of mortality, a desire to remain, through the lens of a biography concerned with the relationship of personal geography to death. We try to hold on to time, and the things we do to give our lives ballast are attempts to live in multiple points on the life-death continuum. However, we are only allowed to exist at one sliding point on that continuum, and though we disdain letting go of time, mortality is the inevitable manifestation of time letting go of us. When time lets go of us, the earth reclaims us. Collectively, this body of work addresses that, and aims to move the viewer to reconsider his or her relationship with mortality, nature, and the passage of time, and to ask, “How do I deal with my own mortality?”
