Opening Reception: Wednesday November 13th 5:30 – 8:00 PM
SOLSTICE WINDOW — free-hanging, sculpture dimensions: 9′ x 24″ x 11″; wire, plaster tape, acrylic paint
SOLSTICE WINDOW is based on a corner of architecture in Chaco Canyon, a New Mexico UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a ancient urban center surrounded by dramatic desert landscape, that was the center of American indigenous Culture.
The Chacoan world synchronized their buildings to not only align with solar, lunar, equinox, and solstice cycles, but also interrelate to each other, built in “symmetrically organized designs” on axes of major and minor lunar standstills.
This incredible alignment, made without telescopes or tools, would have required generations of astronomical observations and centuries of skillfully coordinated construction. For example, buildings like Chetro Ketl and Pueblo Bonito are oriented to face the direction of the rising and setting moon. When the moon reaches its lunar standstill (which takes place once every 18.6 years) it is framed perfectly by the doorways.
My sculpture pays hommage to the corner window where shafts of light marked a calendar on the wall that caught its rays.
Fred Eggan, a historian and archeologist of Hopi culture, suggests, “Chaco Canyon may have been such a center place and a place of mediation and transition between these cycles and between the worlds of the living and the dead.” **
— **Heritage Inspirations Blog
