Horizontal Yellow
The Great Plains, the horizon seemingly an endless line, most often but not always yellow. This is my home, where I have spent the majority of my 62 years, leaving occasionally, almost but not quiet long enough to see the place I have inhabited as an outsider would. The title of the show and its titular piece is borrowed from the author Dan Flores who has lived on and around the Great Plains and written about the flora, fauna and the ecology that is unique to the region. Dan was inspired to create the title for the book from readings of Navajo cosmology. My scant understanding is that the Navajo creation myths assigned sacred colors to the four cardinal directions. Yellow was the color assigned to the west: hence Horizontal Yellow. Unbeknownst to Dan at the time of publishing his book, the New Mexico poet Spud Johnson had published a collection of poems of the same title in 1935. I only intended to steal Dan’s title with some liberal “borrowing” from the Navajo people, not wholesale literary theft, but there you go. I digress.
I have in the past claimed that my work is work of my environment, MY PLACE. The work in this show is very specifically of this place. A place whose most unique feature is the endless horizon, an absence more than a presence, a place that I argue that rather than be dismissed as flyover country and despoiled because of the sparsity of human population should be treasured and protected for that absence, not dismissed and disdained.
The three primary sculptures of this show: a yellow line, a red diagonal, and a golden flecked circle can be read formally as foundational marks from an artist. Peel one layer back and you get the iron oxide pigments that were used to add color to two of the pieces. The use of the iron oxide is a reinforcement of my almost exclusive use of iron as a medium. The gold leaf on the circle resonates with the rising sun, it can bring to mind remnants of gold leaf on an iron Buddha head, or the golden rays of the rising sun crossing the plains to light the yellow horizon. If your mind turns a certain direction the gold can conjure images of plunder sought by the colonial Spanish who brought irrevocable changes to the region in search of resources that largely eluded them in the American West.
The prints in the show are from two different series of work. The Heat Etchings are studies of iron and its states of degradation through the forces of time, heat, and oxidation. The pigments used to color the inks are largely the same oxides used to lend color to the sculptural pieces in the show. The CMY suites were done as a way for me to study the interactions and combinations of color …. using the forms of my objects to create patterns. The basis of these objects was originally derived by pulling a mold off of a 16th century nail from the door of a Spanish castle. The patterns created by combining these “jack” shapes results in a pattern that is commonly found in Moorish architectural details in Spain where the colonists were once themselves colonised.
The effect of these overlapping themes creates an echo chamber where images dance at the corner of one’s vison like heat waves distorting the horizon on a July day. Maybe reminding us that all things change, that dominance is fleeting and sometimes if we are lucky some good will remain as a hybrid of cultural collisions.
I wish to thank Dan Flores for graciously allowing me to poach the title of his book, Jimmy Hughes who showed up at just the right moment and was a tremendous help in getting the show here and installed, and my wife Lindy without whose help I could not have produced this work.