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M D A N E Z A H O R S K Y , T H E W I R E S

P O I E S I S

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M D A N E Z A H O R S K Y , T H E W I R E S

p o i e s i sa c t i

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A few years ago I wrote a thesis that explored art and wonder in western culture. The central claim was that Greco-Roman and Native North American traditions and practices were two branches of a central river that needed to be understood holistically as “kin” or coming to delta and disseminating into the greater ocean of culture. As such, it was the duty of artists as cultural practioners to help reconnect society to the idea that any given moment was ever pregnant with the possibility of an inclusive sublimity and vision. The ideas began in that journey have both informed and directly translated into the one I’ve found myself on now. It has lead me to many places, and changed the way I make work, moving from conventional materials and practices to those shaped and rightly bound by the contexts in which I find myself. Though I’m not a religious person, through the study of of this material and the stories that have been both found and made along the way, I’ve come into a deep and penetrating methodology that trancends tacit assumption and my own critical skepticism.

One of the crucial pieces has been a better way to articulate how we experience time. In ancient Greece there were two delineations of experienced time: Kronos [regular time] and Kairos [serendipitous time], moments in which the walls between “I” and the rest of the world break down and fade away. In modernity our attention spans are corroded by social media, uber connectivity, and a need for instantaneous affirmation. Many find stillness foreign, even uncomfortable; it takes great effort to unplug, or to enjoy a moment for its own sake, unaltered by creative filters or the reactions of others. This shifting worldview not only changes how we interact with time and place but the types of things that are made in response to them. This project began as a journey back to stillness, to be with the ephemeral yet lasting moments in life.

Poïesis, is the creative act as a product of engaged and mindful experience as it relates to perception, and invokes imagination. Poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and self with the world. This work as poïesis is an offering. It endeavors as vessel, to acclimate the viewer with Place as identity shaper and as personal and cultural mythology made manifest. Each shot is presented from a fixed vantage point of fixed time. Cumulatively they become a synthesis of experience and interactivity. Principle to each is a sculpture crafted from the materials specific to each Place, built as a testament to its genius loci, trying as much as possible to let the stories therein have their say in its making.

- -o m n i u m f a b u l i s c o n t e x t a v i s v i v u s

o m n i u m f a b u l i s c o n t e x t a v i s v i v u s

The opening gesture of this first act, attempts to begin a greater dialog between “I” and “Place.” In specific to begin thinking about both as axis points that contain and anchor not just attributes but events. I submit that to know what something or someone is, you must understand what has or is happening not just to but also within them/it.

In short, You, are not a noun but a verb, the sum of those things happening both inside and around you, of your experiences and responses, your memories and aspirations. They reach out through you into the future so the present may expand towards the infinite.

The vehicle that binds and catalyzes these events, actions, and interactions together is story.

Normally when we think of story we attribute it to the realm of something externally produced, a product someone conveys in the manner of true or embellished accounts of what he/she or others have done. We codify it as the vehicle by which information is passed across culture and time.

But I think we discount the vastness of its nature and its ever-present and underriding role in the very foundation of our lives as animals capable of abstraction. Consider how we process information. Our senses register selective inputs; then the brain constructs its own simulation of those inputs. Only after this do we have our first conscious experience of what has been perceived. Everything outside of “us” comes into our consciousness in the form of sequence of events, a story being told.

The only way we can interact with what is outside [at least rationally] is through relationally meaningful and categorically organized maps. these are substantially informed and crafted by the cultural environments we come from. To give this continuity, to make any sense of it at all is to anchor each of these experiences within a narrative.

The meaning we intrinsically attribute to ourselves and the others is both found and made in and out of the unique trajectories each of us traces, much like the streaks of molecules in a bubble chamber. We form identity and community through cataloguing and aggregating our histories of specific reactions to experiences we have along those trajectories, like an an irregular and variagated line formed from soft clay that hardens as we age.

It is because of this that I believe story and magic are intertwined to the point of the indiscernible. In “Towards a Sustainable Enchantment” I defined magic as “the emotional exchange between an individual, his or her intended actions and the environment in which they operate [this includes all actors within that environment].”

For those that practice a genuine and seasoned belief in the magical there is no “supernatural” because the prefix is mute, there is only natural, only THIS place. Each moment is bound to all things before and after it, all that it can ever be or not be. In this they describe one whole action: the unfolding and transmutational process of relationships and their various and often-unforeseen a/effects. These a/ffects are forged and changed through perspectives, consider this quote from the novel “A Thin Red Line.” By James Jones:

As extensions of ourselves, stories are very much alive. Each experience we have offers us the choice to reveal or manufacture content and thus form, be it pain, awe or what have you. That form [or shape] is a part of us and grows into personal and cultural feedback loops that go on to a/effect other people, places, and things exponentially. We can shape our stories just as they can shape us. In this way, magic, becomes the membrane of interaction between our stories and us, the personified adjective of the inimitable. Consider David Abram’s depiction of shadow as dialog between rock and light, the shadow is the rock’s language just as human beings can be seen as the universe’s. We are at the core, through-lines of the universe.

“One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain. That death’s got the final word, it’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.”

The reason this is worth consideration is that when we think about our stories [whether ours personally or collectively] with mindfulness and critical reflection we enter into active relationship with ourselves as interdependent parts of the world. This is how we are set ablaze; how we reveal the things we are called to do as a result of the context in which they will exist and not only what that context has to say about them, but what each needs from the other in they’re doing.

Thus, the way we interpret, process, and share our stories creates the direction and open possibility of change within our lives and the lives of others. It provides insight into the world as well as revealing ideas and messages hewn from the anonymity of greater and aggregate experience. Hideaki Anno describes it as a metaphysical extension of one’s own life, the natural direction that your real identity calls to seek out and articulate, that which will live far beyond your merely physical epoch.

This is how our stories are woven into the living, each experience, no matter how mundane or seemingly innocuous is incorporated into who we are as through lines. They are woven into the very fabric of recall and moral that our consciousness uses to determine the choices and consequences we weigh in any given moment. It is this mindfulness and import that Herman Hesse spoke of:

We as part and parcel of a living and animate world act out the myriad possibilities available to us, some known others not. They are born through us and in turn trace back to the roots from which they came. This is how the past speaks to the future, the living to the dead.

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.”

f e a t u r i n g a l e x a n d e r ' s m i l l

The Wires [Sascha Groschang and Laurel Morgan] wrote and composed Alexander’s Mill in 2009/2010 in the American Roots style. They both grew up heavily influenced by the 1996 album

“Appalachian Waltz” by Mark O-Connor, Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma. The main melody of Alexander’s Mill is an original theme that they wrote together, but it’s form is loosely based on the Edgar Meyer

arrangement of the traditional tune ‘Star of the Country Down’ from the aforementioned album. As with most of the Wire’s pieces, there is a shared mental image that accompanies the tune. Alexanders’

Mill springs from images of nature, the south, isolated rural living, and spirituality. Growing up, Sascha spent many of her weekends in the Ozark mountains of southern Missouri, and the beauty of nature and

genuineness of its people helped to shape the mood of the piece. The title was chosen as they were looking through maps of the south. Laurel has close ties to North Carolina, and one of Sascha’s best

friends grew up in rural Tennessee. Despite having to leave because of bullying and bigotry, he always spoke of the place he grew up in as sort of magical. The piece seeks to capture the essence of these places

in its title, Alexander’s Mill was found on the map somewhere between Tennessee and North Carolina.

f e a t u r i n g a l e x a n d e r ' s m i l l

all

stories

stories

are

woven

woven

into

the

the

living

living

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