From the Structure exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art & History, October 2 – December 26, 2021, Lancaster, CA, now on permanent display.

Familiar shadows are usually relegated to intervals early or late in the day – when glimpsed in the dark though, the implication is that an otherworldly presence is in attendance; however on Lancaster MOAH’s rooftop, shadows are summoned willingly and cast into different roles. What appears is an enclave of forms changing our perceptions of light, color, and time: The Entire Universe Moves Through Irregular Angles in a Rising Wall From an Architectonic City Without Name or Place or Time along with The Wall Temple at the Vanishing Point, balance transformations illuminating multi-surface activations, a choral of repeating and intricate elemental passages sliding away from walls and set as crystalline jewels reaching open and upward toward the heavens.

As a departure from its counterparts inside the museum, this wooden aqueduct and its attendants extend as a trestle would: climbing, a steep transport of fused elements move along the roof, ready to either welcome or jettison emanations into or out to distant galactic landings. They carry energies unseen, absorbing and transmitting reflections, an interleaving of temporal spaces, balanced steady by earthbound hours.

Twenty five different lights are transmissions painting the timbers; while refractions leap across different stratum, the medium saturates all the surfaces and though the structures are stationary, the sparkling, playful action cascades over the entire installation sweeping tight sequences of sharp arrays everywhere. The cloak of twilight and eventual darkness does change the encounter but this is not a completely separate moment from daylight – all these realms are of equal footing, all transitional moments, other states of being that create a topological encounter from several overlapping vantage points – as light is carried throughout, there is an integration, a visual electricity coursing through the whole of the assembly: sightlines map these solid landmarks and envelop the audience as if they are visiting the site of a ceremony or cosmic event.

The distances between the contemporary and the ancient, the earth and the cosmos are shortened; physical objects and bodies communicate their presences as nourishment for understanding place on a purely visual level in a heightened present. The cultivation of this new space binds powerful textures and captured articulations with renewed acuity – this is not a static experience: viewers are invited to investigate and acquaint themselves with the work, a moment of reflection and reverie. The rooftop landscape inspires the audience to stretch connections, imaginations and expressions advancing infinite possibilities of revelation and action.

Each aspect of the installation is a response to the natural world with offerings to larger, intangible, unknown spheres – grains amplified, the physicality of the wood stands intricately assembled; feathered wavelengths punctuating the structures, with no two outlines alike. All the angles, passages and climbing permutations add up to an earthly weight of 2.4 tons – this entire footprint, with its repeating arrangements and supports represents one and half years of labor intensive, creative exercise; meditative and truly somatic in focus. So many exclamations punctuate the constructions, day or night, defying time with their punches – explosive activity radiating, their precisely sanded edges and bodies bear witness to the artist’s commitment to emphasize process as intimate endeavor, standing away from the convention of overtly manufactured objects and revitalizing surfaces through the examination of meticulously singular details. The very action infuses vibrations into these blocks of stacked rays creating wavelengths undulating and releasing (from their own containment) visions of rarified landscapes; distinct vocabularies coupled with visible calculations that extend beyond place and space elaborating upon the possibility that the physical and the intangible already are of one body.

“The infinite variety of evolutionary complexities, inherent to the orderliness of complementary principles operative in Universe, is of unending synergetic uniqueness.”

Suzanne Bybee
Artist and Writer
December 31, 2021