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| Shard of Light |
Open are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts
Utterance
220, from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom Egypt
In approximately 3200 BCE an
enormous passage mound was completed in the Boyne Valley on the east coast of
Ireland. At sunrise on the winter
solstice a shaft of light penetrates the mound through a light box at its
entrance to illuminate a cruciform-shaped chamber 62 feet within.
Sometime between 650 - 900 CE
a cylindrical shaft was cut from the ceiling of a cave to the surface above at
Xochicalco in the Mexican state of Morelos so that on the solar equinox an
intense circular beam of light shines directly onto its floor. If a screen containing a small aperture
is fitted at the top of the shaft it is possible for the cave to operate as a
pinhole camera obscura.
No written records are extant
to interpret these light directing constructions. Exactly what they were for is speculation. One thing is certain, at the moment the
sun's light entered their darkened chambers a door opened between worlds.
Open are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts
Trace Heavens
Since the early twentieth
century humanity has been held between the infinite exteriority of the cosmos
described by Einstein and Hubble and it's mirror image in the infinite
interiority of the psyche described by Freud. For Nizam it is particularly the domestic architecture of
the house that is the physical threshold in the world between "out there" and "in
here," the site of ritualized action and liminal experience where for a
moment we have a foot in both.
Trace Heavens is an illumination of thresholds. It is an overlapping of worlds. It's complexity and beauty is that
Nizam has drawn a picture of ancient celestial world upon perceptual world upon
art world in a tangle of lines like the black chromed rebar of Interminable
Structure. The photographs and sculpture are an
expression of the poetic similitude that exists along two axes of
metaphor: cosmos/architecture/mind
and photographic apparatuses/architecture/eye. Light is the vehicle of transport along these axes, but they
bend into orbits like Einstein rings.
For an example, bringing light into a room is like bringing light into
an ancient solar observatory, is like bringing light into a camera, or light
into the skull and the vitreous chamber of the eye, which again is like
bringing light into a solar observatory.
Looking at Trace Heavens
inevitably leads in these circular patterns, and not only in its metaphors. There are also internal gyrations
between the works (as the image of Fan (a beam of light bounced from mirror to mirror to make the illusion of
the partially opened leaves of a book) is like the image of Disc (an isolated set of ruined concrete stairs), is
like the stepped mats surrounding the Illuminations) and beyond. Follow the spectral lines of Fan and they lead to Robert Smithson's sculpture Pointless
Vanishing Point, a truncated
segment of perspectival lines. By
withholding the resolution of whether those lines will eventually meet at a
single location or unexpectedly veer off, they could point anywhere, it might
be inwards towards the self, the imaginary, and the mechanics of perception; or
it might be out into the world, to the past and the architecture of stepped
pyramids, or to the future and back around to Disc.
Since antiquity the optical
principles of the camera obscura have been well known. In the decades around 1600 the optical
camera obscura became the definitive model for the eye and the mechanics of
sight; light from the object of the eyes' focus passes through its lens, the
image is projected on the retina, and is then transmitted to the brain. The seeming directness of the optical
camera obscura's transference of visual information came to stand for the
veracity of the images of human sight. Early in the nineteenth century the objectivity of
visual perception faltered; how to account for the problem of optical
illusions? What of the persistence
of the afterimage of a spot of light once its been extinguished (the same way
we might see light from a star that long ago ceased to exist); or the
appearance of a three-dimensional object or drawing reversing perspective, as
in the well known figures of the Necker Cube and Schroeder's Staircase
(geometries adopted a century later by artists and seen in the paintings of
Joseph Albers, the sculpture of Smithson, and now in several of Nizam's Thought
Forms)? Artists, philosophers and religious mystics had long talked
of a veil separating humanity from what was real, but now a physical threshold
within ourselves was being
confirmed by physiological evidence.
Color and light, rather than being causes of vision, were discovered to
be effects inseparable from the tissue of our nervous system. A subjective neurological threshold,
like the liquidy sheet of a waterfall at the mouth of a cave, separated us from
external reality.
Following the boom of
university art departments and magazines devoted to art in the 1950’s, an
analogous threshold was recognized in the way art was experienced. Contact with art that mattered changed
and was mainly restricted to university lecture halls and art magazines.
On their screens and in their pages a curious thing happened; art as different
as the Mona Lisa and the pyramids could exist alongside one another of equal
size, their dimensions determined by the frame that held them. In the
minds of some of the young artists looking, this
novel way of perceiving art registered and contributed to a growing sense of art
away from the object. By the latter part of the 1960's new types of art
emerged that concentrated either on the idea as art, or on the idea of art.
In certain cases art was being made not to be experienced directly, but
to be seen through a record of its existence as a reproduction in
photographs. For some artists this
included the manipulation of architecture and light as subjects to be
photographed, but in the 1960's the field of sculpture was expanded to include
their direct manipulation and display as sculptural materials.
Inspired by the ancient solar
architecture of Europe and the Americas, as much as by the artists of the late
1960's, Nizam performed a series of architectural slicings and piercings made
to channel light, and to be experienced only indirectly as photographs. For Shard of Light Nizam cut a slit up the wall and across a section
of ceiling of a house in Delta at the edge of the Fraser river. The circular pattern of Drill Holes
Through Studio Wall is what a
starry sky might have looked like through the shaft at Xochicalco. By the simplest of means Nizam has
created a complex illusion. Through the arrangement of holes of different
sizes, the circle bellies out into an orb and hangs there. A beam of sunlight through a darkened
window creates the glowing geometries of the Thought Forms. In each of these, we see Nizam's manipulation of
light across an architectural threshold transform nondescript rooms into
containers of radiant ideal forms.
Whereas Shard of Light and Drill Holes Through Studio Wall could be experienced directly if imperfectly in
the world, the Thought Forms
can only exist as photographs or ideas in the mind; they are illusions produced
by a bit of photographic sleight of hand.
To make them appear Nizam had to use the magician's props of smoke and
mirrors. Smoke made the beam of
light visible as Nizam bounced it from mirror to mirror. Because the light could only be bounced
three times from its source at the window before becoming too diffuse to
continue, each form was composed in camera through a process of multiple
exposures. After waiting
patiently, anticipating the moment the sun would finally appear through the
hole in the blind, Nizam had to work quickly in sets of triads always starting
at the source before the sun progressed too far; 1-2-3, 1-2-3, the rhythm of a
waltz.
Given how important Nizam's
experience of time, anticipation and patience were to his experiencing the
light and making the photographs (as it must likewise have been to the ancient
astronomers marking the passage of the sun on its yearly return) Nizam's
decision to fix the light in photographs is curious, but consider its
effects. Experiencing the work as
photographs encourages an engagement with the history of photography, and
propels the metaphor photographic apparatuses/ architecture/eye forward. The deeper effect is distancing the
work from a specific physical location, and more importantly, from time. What we don't see when we're looking at
Shard of Light, Drill Holes Through Studio Wall, and Thought Forms is that the
house in Delta was abandoned and waiting for demolition; that the holes drilled
in the sheetrock wall of the studio are ragged; or that the hole in the window
covering is torn and that the basement is dingy. Standing in their presence as installations, location and
detail would anchor the work, and ourselves, too firmly in the temporal
world. Draining our experience of
time, and the associated conditions of anticipation and patience, the
photographs push us away to a distance that allows the work to operate in a
manner distinct from the ordinary; the light, and our experience of it, become
eternal.
A fragment and a photograph
are the same: An architectural
fragment is a piece isolated from the original totality of the architecture; a
photograph is a piece isolated from the architecture of the world. If we look for the connection between
fragment and photograph in Trace Heavens besides their fundamental similarity as fragments, we find it in the
effect they have on their subjects; they create distance. Fragments of demolished homes retain a
residue of their original function.
The entry stairs etched on the round copper plate of Disc still lead, the empty foundations of the Illuminations could still carry a home, but separated from
their specific material destination they are freed to be thresholds to the
immaterial and the imaginary.
After the general mysteriousness of references to ancient architecture,
at the top of Disc's stairs I
imagine one of those liquidy mirror-like portals favored by time travelers in
science fiction.
Untethering these
architectural elements as fragments is the equivalent of making the light
eternal through photography. The Illuminations gain additional distance from the ordinary by the
strangeness of their appearance.
It's not only the difficulty of picking them out of their isolation in
what looks like a landscape, but through their treatment as solarizations. By flashing the photograph with light
while it's being developed the lights and darks of the image are reversed so
that it ends up looking like something in between a positive and a negative,
and giving it it's silvery effect.
Released from the specifics of time and place Nizam moves light and
architecture across the threshold from profane to the sacred world. Turning full circle, when the ancients
built their astronomical architectures, they did so to fix the light and make
it as predictable as they could; like a photograph.
The way Nizam has formed the
light in immaterial pieces like Shard of Light and Thought Forms makes them truly liminal works on the threshold
between photography and sculpture.
Firmly on the other side, the side of sculpture, are the works that
Nizam lets us experience directly, Interminable Structure and Door Slab. As
fragments of architecture they share a subject with a number of the photographs, but in many ways they're the
photographs' reverse: white to black; light to the absence of light; straight
to crooked; image to solid.
The familiar diagram of the
way perception works is of a pyramid leading away from its base at an object to
an apex at an eye. The diagram for
the mechanics of a pinhole camera and camera obscura are the same, with the eye
replaced by a small hole or lens.
The straight lines of the pyramid represent light, so it's not too much
to say that perception is light.
Photography being an art of light, it is also the art of straight
lines. Interminable Structure is made of bent lines, photography's opposite,
therefore sculpture. The rebar
from which it's made comes from the demolished buildings of the Little Mountain
housing project, the site of Nizam's previous series Memorandoms. In
its present arrangement it resembles a ball or basket, but its individual
pieces are infinitely variable. As
architectural wreckage it is similar to Disc and Illuminations.
Door Slab is the clearest representation of a threshold or doorway. Calling it a "slab" is a bit
ironic since that usually implies a thickness. It's a sculpture, but barely so; a thin film of Cinefoil (a
matte black aluminum material used in photography and cinema) pressed into the
mere imprint of a door. With just
more dimension than an image, it looks like it's working itself away from being
a photograph towards an object. Rather
than reflecting light it leans against the wall, a wispy, dark shadow absorbing
it.
The awareness of existing at a
threshold, whether within ourselves, in the world, or between this one and the
next, is uniquely human, as is the desire to cross. In the hubbub of the ordinary world, that awareness is often
dampened. Through photographs,
sculpture, architecture, and light, especially light, Trace Heavens shows us that doorways between here and there abound, located right in
front of us or deep in the primitive portion of our brains. Through the poetry of its revolving
metaphors it gives us a gentle, whispered reminder of the relationships between
worlds. By creating distance from
the ordinary, Trace Heavens brings the recognition of our liminal state back
to the threshold of consciousness and thereby takes its place as part of the
fundamental expression of what it means to be human.
