Can the center hold?
1998-2011
Can the Center Hold? references the poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
Initially this series of ‘architecturally constructed’ handmade collages, cut and pasted from discarded architectural magazines, glued onto one-foot square wood panels; compelling but unfinished, this work continued to hold my interest as I intermittently struggled with the next step in my process. Thirteen years later it occurred to me to try scanning and digitally printing them at a greatly enlarged scale from the original works.
This achieved my intended outcome: creating a visual space for the viewer to contemplate and enter mentally. The confusion of planes and perspectives offers a new spatial experience, a space of imagination or fantasy, or perhaps a vision of the world of the future. All of these images have one or more centers and are spatially complex, creating a calm focus inside the hyper-active density of the urban milieu. When held in the viewer's gaze, positive and negative spaces start to move and flip, as with traditional mandalas.
“Chaos seems to be the new normal, resulting in meditation practice gaining notable ground as a coping strategy. There is a growing need to create stillness within the instability, chaos and threats of contemporary life, to transform confusion into clarity, even if temporarily, a moment at a time.” I wrote these words in 2017, long before the Covid-19 pandemic that validates them. Whatever our global and local future we will re-construct it together, with light at the center.
