Hermaion

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.” An excerpt from Mark Rothko’s essay The Romantics Were Prompted, published in Possibilities 1: Winter 1947-48

By leveling out the hierarchy of editioned books and fusing copies into a unique body of work, a new polyphonic system is created. In this departure from inherited structure, each book becomes a tangent, a spin-off of an inexistent original. While differing in shape and sequence, books maintain a strong resemblance, and generate a functional independence (of voices and melodies).

Hermaion* is a fluctuating installation of five upright, revolving books. With their pages open as mitered altars, books form a panopticon with innumerable permutations. Books are wordless novels/imbroglios held by deep interlocked feelings of loneliness and isolation. They are feverish recollections of an orphic journey and strive for love and reacceptance. Their world is grotesquely silent and chthonic, and the pages only scratch the surface. Together they create a spiraling narrative. In this new destabilized system of reading, books compete and complete each other. The internal state of despair becomes the evidence attempting to break from a recidivistic loop.

* Lewis Hyde, the author of the book ‘Trickster makes this world’, describes hermaion as a mistake in weaving pattern representing a gift, or an opportunity in better understanding of a larger picture (pattern).