THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPIRITS
A falcon effortlessly glided over-head as I rest after hard work at a rooftop yoga class, late on a Friday morning. I took comfort in their presence, closing my eyes I felt one with the nature around me, the bright cerulean sky reaching further than my comprehension understands above me, the earth, reaching the same below me, the breeze tickling my eager skin, the bird watching over me. The back-side of my eyelids were ablaze with the blues, pinks and oranges of dusk, an effect of closing my eyes with the fresh almost-afternoon sun backlighting my skin from hundreds of sky-heights away. These colours, this place, this world, these elements; it was a spiritual experience. This recollected moment, a journal worthy experience, lead me here: The Architecture of Spirits, a spiritual landscape, not only mine, but theirs, ours; supporting, leaning, requiring each other to stand on our own two feet. This exhibition is a collection of large scale, fragile sculptural structures, coloured plinths, and whimsical wooden forms. Together each sculpture, consisting of several objects, create a story, scene, or composition. I intend to implicate the physical space created and used by the presence of and audience member through their inclusion within the archway of a delicate sculptural form, or through the penetrating reach of long sculpture arms into the personal space of a viewer, “where creases intersect is where I plant my feet. But, if I shift my centre of gravity from past or future”.
These fragile sculptures balance on themselves, they are structures which maintain its own fragile existence. They began as large scale, intuitive drawings, and passed through layers of two-dimensional and three-dimensional thinking. The result of this experimentation has lead to these drawings in space, three dimensional compositions. The lines are perspectives, or disrupted perspectives as inspired by the forced three-dimensional space of painted rococo, and baroque theatre stage design. As the audience moves with the work, these reaching bodies in space shift, move, expand and contract. These sculptures are metaphorical conversations between people, using each other to support and balance one another, connecting through common denominators, a place where “being and non-being create each other”. The lightness of the objects are juxtaposed with the heavy concreteness of the coloured plinths. This weight coming from the ground, the earth, the lightness coming from air, the heavens, from a place of spiritual awareness and consciousness, from the architecture of human interaction. There is a sense of Otherness within these gentle structures, between a viewer and the art, between two audience members and between the supports within the structure themselves. A delicate concept of conversation between one Self and an Other, between our innate sense of spiritual understanding, between the Other within our own bodies, our own souls. The completed dioramic collections create scenes, paused picturesque spectacles that continue this play with perspective and scale. The smaller, darker, objects create hinting gestures to specific settings. A pathway, a lonely doorway, puddles or pools, lakes, boulders, cell structures, grounded clouds; they are minimal and simplified forms intended to create a system of understanding, or the punctuation required to finalize their narrative. The sudo memphis inspired forms are quasi humorous, aesthetic objects used as a adjectives within the composition. “Memphis sees design as a means of direct … communication, contemporizes its content and perfects the potential of a dynamic semantics”; using this methodology I intend to create this communicative nature of dialogue between art object and audience through the use of abstraction, which , according to Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, and Dada sound poet Hugo Ball is “the key to unlocking spirituality in art”.
The platforms that support the sculptures have many direct and indirect purposes. Politically, the white cube is a charged space, while doing everything in its power to remain neutral, free from any constraints or affiliations with the outside world. Plinth structure uses similar political arguments to metaphorically disappear. A smaller white, ‘neutral’ cube within the larger context of the political white-cube as a method of logistical support for sculpture, or art objects. There exists yet another cube, an invisible one, that rests firmly on the top of the plinth, as though made of glass. This third cube acts as a protective and restrictive barrier between art object and viewer. Following and continuing with this line of research and understanding I turned to self reflection to answer the question: what does a platform mean to me and my practice? The plinth, box, support is exactly that, a support structure or system. They are never-meant-to-be-seen structures for objects to stand or lean. This became quite a personal question, one of my own support and structure and for that I turned to the landscape. There is an obvious physicality to have one’s own feet planted on the ground. The idea of landscape as support came to completion in the colour choices of the plinths within this exhibition. These supports are directly involved with the sculptures, however in order to break the politics of certain modern museum, status quo, methods of display, the sculptures themselves occasionally break the fifth-wall between audience and artwork. These plinths are influenced and interpreted by my own hand, fused with handmade and individualized display mechanisms. Some supports are strictly for balance, some sculptures teetering on the edge of imbalance, some collective displays are meant to penetrate into the space occupied by the audience, the liminal space between object and non-object, between viewer and artwork, between consciousness and unconsciousness. “Architecture . . . does not consist in the sum of the width, length, and height of the structural elements which enclose space, but in the void itself, the enclosed space in which [humankind] lives and moves. . . . Internal space, that space which . . . cannot be completely represented in any form, which can be grasped and felt only through direct experience”.
The colours of the plinths reference the Albertan landscape, particularly, the colour of the light at dusk and how it influences the colours one can perceive; as such, the colours are directly pulled from landscape photography, capturing the sky and atmospheric perspective, colours which “dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light,”. Canada is credited with some of the clearest skies in the world. The gradient from pale pink, to soft yellow, to warm blue that touches the faded horizon at dusk is, to me, truly alluring. These same colours presented themselves to me while I was resting in bright sunshine. When my eyes closed, I began to pay attention to the colour I saw, staring at the back of my eyelids backlit from the afternoon sun. Colours that are similar in tone to the hues of twilight, when the sun begins to set. Using this colour palette, and utilizing the plinths as supports, rather than simple methods of display as used and accepted by museums, they become forms within an abstracted landscape, a foundation for the architectural sculptures. It is difficult to put into words that which I find impossible to describe: a feeling, a complex emotion beyond the limitations of language. Inspiration from universal methods of communication such as music, art, colour, emotions is what primarily guides my interpretation of this world around us, around me. This concept, occurs to me, a tricky subject to discuss simply due to language, and the inability to fully describe certain things. Any individual who may speak a different language than another understands the complexity of describing words, or meanings when the translated language has no such word, description, or understanding. It is perhaps impossible to properly articulate spiritual awareness or experience, and that may be why it has lead to such a divide in our contemporary society. In an effort to break free from man-made explanations for the spiritual realm, my methods are always to return to basics, trust in what I know and understand, and allow new experiences to guide my learning. This exhibition is an experimental way to communicate that which I know, that which I understand, and that which I have learned. Experiences guide my choice of colour, self reflection leads to the design of the exhibition, and metaphorical or allegorical systems of description govern my form and structure. This work comes from my heart, my soul, my inner Self and its dialogue with my spiritual Other. These are personal, sometimes difficult truths that resonate emotionally within myself, and my hope, my desire, is that they may resonate with you. 1 Leanne MCintosh. Liminal Space. Lantzville, B.C., Canada: Oolichan Books, 2005. pg 55 2 Dennis dorn, and Mark Shanda. Drafting for the Theatre. SIU Press, 2012. 3 McIntosh. Liminal Space. pg 49 4 Michael erlhoff, and Marshall, Timothy, eds. Design Dictionary : Perspectives on Design Terminology. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2007 5 Gail De Angelis, Wassily Kandinsky's Artistic Journey into the Spiritual (MA Ths., California State University, 2009), p. 36 6 Patricia Falguières. Politics for the White Cube: The Italian Way. Grey Room 64 (July 2016): 6–39. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. pg 25 9 Catherine L. Albanese. A Republic of Mind and Spirit : A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. pg. 176
