1974 Threshholds of the Forest

The precarious interface between nature and culture, of (Gilles Deleuze) the best animals are flat animals, the best Space is Deep Space caught my interest. A return to perspective with the sole purpose of subverting its systems of rational organization, exaggerating its illusionistic strategies. Each vision becomes a souvenir of our problematic relationship with the natural world as both conquerors and tamers. The spectators, contingency on the persistence of renewal and potential. A dream retold never has the same resonance in the telling. The cycle became an ardent portrait of the complex internal terrain of self-doubt.

70.1. THE BEGINNING OF THE SHARPNESS

The world through a lens is seen in a reflective sphere. The sharpness is a reversal tunnel at the beginning of a left-handed world. Allegorical mirrors are simulacra, transparent and manifest. Pleasure consists more in discovering in what was artificial and counterfeit, the elusive differences conflict between the impulse to exploit and the urge to nurture and protect. The act of love was a type of self-emulation. Innocent love results in experience and ends in death.

69. L’Age d’Or (Joan of Arc)

The figure of Joan of Arc is a symbol of eternal youth, through an early demise. Made from aged shellacked flax and linen, hardened to shape. The mirror is no longer turned toward the world, but to evocation of two facets of time, the static and eternal state. The disembodied hands are self-portraits by proxy. The mirrors catch unexpected angles that guard our precincts. They establish a voyeuristic context, a metaphor of inwardness to what we must necessarily exclude. While the works result from human intervention, they retain enough of nature to give a strangely animate quality. Figures clothe by implication, bodies underneath their peremptory, hidden bodies. She wears a scarf, sits in illusionist cup with the abstract geometry of a skull facing her, the skull partnering death. Two skulls gazing in opposite directions to themselves the mirrors, greet the beginning and the end. The cup’s original function to hold liquid, broadens to connotations of totality.

72. Narcissus at the Pool

Pays tribute to Ingres and incorporates the mirror, as status object, surveillance tool and emblem of idealized nature. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage. A view to separate the world of things in an attempt to veil by annexing. A microscope lighting mirror is used to catch the eye. The door through which the soul frees itself by passing, with a spy-camera detachment.

73. MEDUSA INFVITABILE FATVM

(inescapable fate)

MEDUSA was a mortal woman turned to a Gorgon for profaning one of Athena’s temples by mating there with Poseidon, god of the Sea. Perseus used a polished bronze shield, the gift of Athena as a mirror in which he could watch Medusa’s reflection, unscathed as he cut her head off. Chrysaor and Pegasus, the winged horse leaped from Medusa’s body as her head was struck off. Perseus also had winged sandals and helmet that made him invisible. Even in death Medusa’s head retained its lethal power, which Perseus gives to Athena to place in the middle of her breastplate.