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"It is clear that polarities loom large in human thought.
All cultures note and deal with such oppositions as night/day (or darkness/light),
male/female, sky/earth, life/death, and a host of others... the attractiveness
of dualistic thinking lies... in the solution it offers to the problem
of ensuring an ordered relationship between antitheses that cannot be
allowed to become antipathies. It is not so much that it offers order,
for all systems of thought do that, but that it offers equilibrium. Dualistic
theories create order by postulating a harmonious interaction of contradictory
principles."¹
The notion of opposites is pervasive in human culture
and the ways in which these systems function is varied. Religious dualism,
for example, emphasizes the struggle between the opposites of good and
evil and hopes for a time when good will be victorious. Other dualistic
theories emphasize the necessary complementarity of opposites that produce
and maintain a cosmic harmony. This latter type of dualism is usually
attributed to tribal societies and ancient civilizations. Anthropologists
and sociologists, however, argue that contemporary culture still functions
around a dualistic system, but that scientific thinking has eroded the
spiritual basis for it and the desire for equilibrium is now centred on
the social, not the cosmic, order. ²
In Dance of Gaia, Angela Luvera summons up a
personal version of this dualism, a respect for polarities and for their
equality. Nature/culture, empty/full, positive/negative, darkness/light,
seen/unseen, and present/ absent are important components of the installation.
The installation is a labyrinth, a simple maze created from cotton panels hung floor to ceiling, anchored by the cardinal points
and their corresponding elements
Dualistic notions exist in many different ways throughout the installation.
The printed images on the cotton, and the very nature of the serigraphic
process, are one example of positive/negative. The cardinal points themselves
exist as polarities, and only within the context of each other. A reverence
for nature is expressed through cultural icons. The lighting on the cotton
panels and the shadows created play with darkness/light. The labyrinth
itself is a powerful environment summoning up presence/absence, what is
seen/unseen, emptiness/fullness.
The maze exists as a series of negative spaces, the
thin cotton walls separating one from another. For me, it was these spaces
that were most tender; in their emptiness, they held an expectant promise.
One is introduced to ancient symbols outside the maze, but travelling
through the maze to the centre one finds little embellishment. Sometimes
mazes are created to intentionally disorient the traveller, but in this
case the route is simple, as if to say this is a passage, not a game.
My first impression of the space, and one that continues
to return to me, was that of a prayer or a chant. This is partly due to
the repetition of panels, images and text within the installation. It
is like a soft echo, an urging-on. It is this that guides you through
the space, between the walls of the labyrinth, to the centre, to your
own conclusions - not right or wrong, good or bad, but a delicate equilibrium,
an offer you respond to in your own way.
Luvera refers to ancient mysteries and myth through
images and poetry - the Labyrinth, the Dance of the Bee, the Magical Square,
the Goddess of Fertility - but at the core (at the literal core of her
installation) is a very personal item. It is hung slightly off-centre;
below it is a mound of grain. The item is an abstraction, in glass and
copper, of a wooden template she has carried with her since childhood.
She mentions this article in her written statement that accompanies the
exhibition:
"Since I was a child, a little carved wooden template
has always been with me. In my mind, the empty space created by the pattern
on the block of wood became transformed into abstract figures."
Only she knows the significance of this object for herself,
like any of us can know why a certain keepsake becomes overwhelmingly
important, but I suspect that this item and its childhood memories may
have a lot to do with Luvera's pursuance of art and architecture. What
it tells me, as a viewer of the exhibition, is that, through ritual and
story, what remains most important is what is at our personal centre -
what it is that brought us to this point - what is at once both absent
and wholly present.
"Proust remarked on a paradox of experience - that beauty,
in reality, is often disappointing, since the imagination can only engage
that which is absent. Sometimes the most poignant qualities of a site
come not from what is actually there, but from what is connected to it,
through time and space, by our recollections and hopes."³
Notes:
1. David Maybury-Lewis, The Quest for Harmony in The Attraction
of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode, eds. David
Maybury-Lewis and Uri Almagor (Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
1989), pp.12-13.
2. Maybury-Lewis, pp. 4-15.
3. Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell and William Turnball, Jr., The
Poetics of Gardens (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1995),
p. 10.
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