This exhibition is part of a cycle of works exploring the relationships between ancient and contemporary worldviews in the context of emerging global culture. In doing so, it encounters a vast scope of human history and culture, from past to present, from the Mediterranean to Asia, from Aton (and Ikhnaton) to atoms, from Zeus Ammon to amino-acids. Operating in a consciously syncretic mode, it intertwines our scientific understanding of how we literally assemble ourselves, in a molecular sense, with a secularized pagan/polytheistic awareness of the re-ligament to nature through localized wonder.
This is clear: to eat is to literally dismantle another organism in order to extract from it the building materials we are made of, proteins, plus the energy needed for new construction. Strictly formal and geometric operations are guided by instructions of a genetic code which is itself evolving. Likewise, for our minds, to learn is to take apart what we encounter in order to recombine ideas into new meanings. But even ideas are material: memories begin as simple protein accumulations along neural pathways. All is here. All is now.
Our bodies are made of tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins. These proteins are built of twenty-two proteinogenic amino acids. Of these twenty-two, ten are "essential" -- meaning that our bodies cannot build them and we must therefore extract them from other organisms. Plainly, to build our substance, our "essence," we consume the substance of other creatures. This exhibition explores these ten essential structures in the dissolution and recomposition of substance.
In the history of ideas, "essence" ("ουσ?α") has been contested territory. In the West, it was part of the historical argument between "consubstantial" or "transubstantial" ("ομοο?σιο?" and "ομο?οουσιο?," whose difference is but one letter, the famous "iota" -- for which thousands were persecuted). At issue was whether there was one god or many, of one kind or many, in one location (exocosmic, outside this world) or many (encosmic, in many shrines, in nature), deserving one manner of respect or many. For two millenia, the idea of the one dominated. Now, science, ecology, economy, and culture are making it evident that it is imperative that we attend to the many.
Implicit in this work is the growing recognition that many of the problems we face, on a planetary scale, are caused by how we view the world, what we value and what we disregard, and that to correct them, we must make our views more inclusive, more local, and more attentive to all that is particular and rare.
