For Want of Meaning . . . . . press release . . . . . “The Waymasters: A mysterious race who drive endlessly across the incredible network of roads which covers their planet” The word “cosmogony” refers to the conception, or perhaps the construction, of a model that relates to the genesis of the universe. By my estimation, it doesn’t need to mean a model of our existing cosmos. Most of us tend to privilege the contributions of theologians or philosophers that stretch their fingers towards the will of creation, or of wild-haired academics nodding knowingly at the numbers and figures spit out of CERN. Make no mistake, these contributions are invaluable as we problematize existence, but it ain’t just the clergy and the physicists who teach us the vocabulary of the universe. For over forty years the artist Robert Mirek has strived to create an alternate alphabet that we might utilize to create entirely new conceptions of physical and mental spaces. In looking at Mirek’s various series the artist has created his own paradigm. Yet this work somehow feels familiar, as if it is accessing what is imprinted upon the more ancient sub-basements of the mind. Perhaps something meta-physical. In the artist’s series Threads each piece feels primeval, as something that exists archetypally, harkening to some kind of rubric of existence, yet discrete and immediate. Like appetites or emotions stripped of personhood, leaving only the skeletal under-carriage of affect. In Strands the symmetrical arrangements of glass and stone reach out from the wall, as if still in formation. In Threads the bones of his compositions are revealed: plywood, intricately cut and layered into details that suggest a rigid architecture, an order, then upended by seemingly chaotic applications of multicolored fibers. Mirek said that he likes to think of these applications as, perhaps, holiday flight projections over the nation. Looking at his catalogue, it often feels organic. This riff on the organic is particularly felt when viewing Mirek’s series Seeds, Comets and Shuttlecocks, like he has cultured a rib into something more. Mirek has spent a career culturing, building and accreting layers of varying durability into adjacent structures. Raw ingredients are augmented or terra-formed into landscape features, settlements and glyphs. All are discrete, but ultimately knowable in relation to one another. Each individual work possesses its own value and can be appreciated as such, but when taken together a network appears, a constellation of meaning suggests itself. “Constellation,” I think, is an evocative word. I often think of constellations as a natural order. But once, even lightly interrogated the logic of this term falls apart. We create constellations. We take these scattered points of light and pull them together into comprehensible patterns. Like in Mirek’s newest series, Tarpaulins, he seems to take a suggested, even ethereal, form and layer something substantial above. We are satisfied, yet the dissonance remains, dancing in our periphery. Our minds want to create order out of this dissonance, they demand it, and this is the artistry of Robert Mirek. To define the individual, but to organize it symphonically. To restlessly traverse the networks that connect our worlds, organizing the lights as we search for meaning. To contact Dan Jones: DanJones.srs@gmall.com |
|
Make no mistake, these contributions are invaluable as we problematize existence, but it ain’t just the clergy and the physicists who teach us the vocabulary |