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Installation

A Spectrum of Jewels

2010 · New York City
Solo installation, The Lab Gallery, New York City, March 2010 — curated by Robert C. Morgan
A Spectrum of Jewels installed at The Lab Gallery, New York — hundreds of small spheres suspended on wires through a white room, with black placards reading Emptiness, Urbanity, Monasticism and equations such as Emptiness times Existence = Doalldoxuval
A Spectrum of Jewels, 2010 — installed at The Lab Gallery, New York City, March 2010. Curated by Robert C. Morgan. Emptiness · Nonexistence · Monasticism · Existence · Urbanity · Thinking

The jewels are the Three Jewels of Buddhism — Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Each is given a word axis running between its two polar extremes, and mapping the three into a Cartesian space turns three separate ideas into one continuous gradient.

The three word axes

Emptiness / Thinking  ·  Existence / Non-existence  ·  Monasticism / Urbanity

Reading the installation

The yellow sphere is the point of origin for the entire system. The green spheres are points representing a concept lying on one of the word axes. The red spheres delineate the coordinate pair where an orthogonal space poem begins; the poem itself lies on the plane between the red sphere, its two adjacent green spheres and the origin.

The twelve orthogonal space poems

Each is in the form A = B × C, and in each one the product is a fabricated word whose meaning is the operation applied to the other two. Twelve of them arranged contiguously in a single coordinate system make what I call a Dodecaorthogonal Space Poem.

The Lab Gallery film

Produced by The Lab Gallery, Roger Smith Hotel, New York City, 2010.

Read about the work