HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

During a Pleiades meteor shower in Northern California I saw a meteorite flying 300 feet in the air trailing flames like a slow crashing sopwith camel about to plummet into a meadow. In a flash it went out and fell to earth leaving a trail of gray smoke in the black freezing air. The shape of the meteorite’s extinguished smoke trail is fixed in my mind. We couldn’t find the rock the next day but I assume it was composed of a good amount of iron.

Iron is one of the elements undoubtedly known to the ancient world. It comes from supernovae, the earth’s core and crust and meteorites. While iron is the most abundant element on Earth, most of this iron is concentrated in the inner and outer cores. Before people mined iron ore from the ground all the raw iron used for smelting it into a molten malleable medium for making objects came from outer space as meteorites. Most of the meteorites that fall to earth are composed of iron. Beads from 3500 BC found in Gerzeh, Egypt and a dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb are both made of meteoric iron.

In mythology the Macranthrope, an allegorical depiction of the universe as a giant anthropomorphic body, issues metals from its flesh and blood. Iron embryos rebirth the metals on earth and are forged by humans into objects of use. These objects carry within them the transformative power of their origin in the macranthropic cosmos. For a good part of the Iron Age iron was mainly used for weapons and the tools used to make those weapons but by the early 17th century in Europe and America wrought iron made up nearly every kind of agricultural, industrial, architectural, domestic and decorative human made object.

In his early 19th century Newport, Kentucky mercantile my ancestor Henry Behrman was surrounded by the wrought iron objects of early America –  kettles, flat irons, pots, kitchen utensils, trammels, broilers, cranes, shovels, toasters, waffle-irons, trivets, bells, hooks, lamps, lanterns, candle and rushlight holders, chandeliers, latches, hinges, locks, bolts, chains, knockers, handles, hasps, balconies, braces, foot scrapers, andirons, fireplace accessories, weather-vanes, shutter-fasteners, scissors, irons, plough plates, wagon and coach wheels, axe-bars, round and square bars of all sizes, stoves, stove backs, mill gudgeons, nails, iron gates and fences, ornamental porch and balcony railings, mantels, attic window grilles, handrails and building hardware. 

In my work I am drawn to locating moments in history – my own, American, the west and human – when markable shifts from the mythos to the logos, the miraculous to the end of enchantment, the infinite to the reductionism of the quantifiable can be unfixed and made permeable.  Something like a picture – both on the wall and in my mind – that I can step into and out of.  In the painting, ((((Ore Macranthropic Echo)))) I wanted to see the origin of the smoking iron-laden meteorite I saw fall from the Pleiades emerge from the macranthrope in the Kentucky woods of Henry Behrman’s mercantile. Depicting and superimposing the moment I saw the macranthrope’s offering in 2009 California onto Henry’s colonial era Kentucky establishes a nexus point for my invented, ancestral, human, material and mythological memory. A site to contemplate the ways in which not seeing and disconnection from the miraculous have produced a dissociation from our relationship with the natural world and its undeniable presence.

Reconstructing a mythological framework as a tool to confront both the dissociative and miraculous qualities of being eventually creates a sound in my paintings. This is how I understand they are activated and transmitting. Before I can hear the painting, the works individually and as a collective expand and contract formally. This process becomes one of disassembly and inversion. Some works maintain a consistent size and remain contained on one piece of paper during their creation. Other works are constructed using multiple panels of paper that are eventually unified by their mount on canvas, but through their making leave artifacts within other works. As paper is cut, redrawn, reordered, rotated, and reassembled events occur between paintings that direct their evolution and whether they appear as anomalies in single instances or as a visual language speaking through reoccurrences in multiple events. How to make a taxonomy of something as it occurs, but happened in the past and evolves to the future? Perspectival shifts through multiple picture planes enfold history into formality, representation into abstraction, fluid occurrences into fixed images.