| 15th May 2013✧11:43
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Listen…
There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”
That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.
No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.
When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.
Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.
We’d free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.
- - Ogden Nash
Although humans have the same range of emotional experience, each individual experiences that range and those emotions differently. What for one man becomes a flower for another man becomes a weapon.
There is that cliché of the teenager who believes that nobody can understand them and nobody has ever loved/hated this much before – when of course, everyone has, and everyone does. What is it inside each person that distinguishes them from their fellows? In which ways are we the same and in which are we forever different?
Synthesis is an exploration into these uncharted territories. It is an investigation through the changing nature of material reality into structure and forms – both physical forms themselves, and the ideological constructs that we create around us in society.
In Listen… the poet Ogden Nash writes about that quintessential isolation of mankind, that cold truth that, ultimately, we can never truly know another person.
We are all alone inside our skulls.
Synthesis, as a fusion of and flow between the works of two very different artists, constitutes that moment when the prisoner inside one skull lays their hand against the bone to almost touch a hand laid on the other side. This is the cataclysm, this need to join with others, to understand and to express. Maybury and McCluskey’s works respond to each other here, at odds with each other but attempting a clear, communicative dialogue.
Synthesis is that point where a solitary bird joins another bird, and they join others, until from one starling there forms a murmuration; and while the birds flock together, there is something startling, and beautiful, and new.
A response to the exhibition Synthesis by Claire McCluskey and Steven Maybury, 21st March - 21st April, Eight Gallery, Dublin 2
Rosaline de Thelen’s Homos Luminosos
Spanish artist Rosaline de Thelen borrows and bends fiber optic technologies to create her haunting Homos Luminosos: floating human forms made of shimmering light. Currently on display at the Kinetica Art Fair in London*, de Thelen’s various fiber optic creations have been capturing audiences for some time, but to imbue the medium with human characteristics certainly introduces a special, even poetic element to her artworks. Homos Luminosos are at once sculptural and ephemeral, their physicality resolving and vanishing as visitors move about the space. It comes as no surprise then that reactions to de Thelen’s work range from childlike fear to spiritual reverence (indeed, one exhibition in 2011 had her work installed in a church). De Thelen is able to contemplate the mysteries of light and illusion while also satisfying our taste for technology.See more work by de Thelen at her website here, and check out more work by Kinetica artists here.
- Erin Saunders
*Kinetica ended March 3rd of this year — thanks for the correction hellenias!
David Maisel - Library of Dust (2008)
“In 1913, the Oregon State Insane Asylum began to cremate the remains of unclaimed patients and their ashes were stored in copper canisters.
After decades in storage the canisters have undergone chemical reactions resulting in explosions of vivid blue-green corrosion. Maisel was granted access to the room in which the canisters were stored to document them for his book.”
Artist’s statement:
“Among my concerns with Library of Dust are the crises of representation that derive from attempts to index or archive the evidence of trauma; the uncanny ability of objects to portray such trauma; and the revelatory possibilities inherent in images of such traumatic disturbances.
While there are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time, the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and to the souls that occupy them.”
A Suspended Boat of 8,000 Sheets of Rice Paper Draped on Bamboo by Zhu Jinshi.
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