Mobius (Cruxis) 1988

Museo D'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy

Dimensions:
16' x 37' x 16'
(488 x 1128 x 488 cm.)

Elements:
Incremented Mobius strip, Revolving celestial opposites (9'10" in diameter), Miraculous niche, Infinities: halo and flame, Amphorae of liquid, Collection lenses , Scale pans with elements, Red plumb lines, Swirled smoke field, Terra red horizon, Ultramarine blue waterline

Materials:
Water, Glass, Mineral Oil, Wax, Pigment, Brass, Flame, Steel, Wood, Muslin, Rayon, Incandescent, day and candle Light, Motors, Electronics, Spices, Salt, Gold.

Comments:

Mobius (Cruxis) explores the interstice between existence as observed, that which we sense yet is unknowable and our own ephemerality. The work is created with a heightened tension between its composite elements revealing something fleeting like a performance, never to be seen quite the same way again.

The features of the work are highlighted in a darkened space on a frontal plane. This façade, integral to the work, is built in front of a linear horizontal skylight. An aperture pierces the wall.

This arched niche recedes beyond the frontal plane, entering into a blue swirled chamber of light. The enshrined natural light fluctuates, illuminating plumes of ethereal vapor. By reflection, a gold ring eclipses the flame of a candle: the image is illusive, immaterial.

The reality of the daylight is woven with the illusion of the images, all in a realm beyond comprehension.

The reality of the daylight is woven with the illusion of the images, all in a realm beyond comprehension.

The external façade presents diametric opposites. Two monumental discs dominate. The gold is brilliant - solar, in the hot spot-light, reflecting the golden glow. The contrasting disc is velvet black pigment, it absorbs the projected light which draws a blue corona on the wall beyond. The discs are interconnected by a measured Mobius strip, they revolve in opposite directions slowly, deliberately.

A humanoid glass amphora, filled with a certain quantity of crystalline water is suspended above a large, very hot circular steel plate. Like a single life in a vital increment of time, droplets form and then fall; as they hit the platen they instantly burst hissing, a small white cloud of vapor, like a puff of smoke, drifts off. Another amphora drops water to an open vessel to slowly accumulate and evaporate like memory.

Below, many plummets hanging on red lines maintain a correlation with the zenith and nadir above a landscape of red earth and ultramarine blue.

The inner realm, beyond the facade, of the unknowable, is infused with real daylight while those elements which stand as evidence for us in front are perhaps just as illusive in light which is artificial.

Mobius (Cruxis) poises the celestial, the omniscient and the immediate to question our expectation of the inevitable, our mortality in the context of what we may view as indelible.