Welcome to Wings’s online photography exhibition from his recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. Below, you will find digital versions of each of the photographs that appeared in the exhibit. During the period of Wings’s exhibit, as you entered the coffeehouse at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, you would have seen photographs arrayed […]
STORIES Our lives are lived in stories — and in stories. Perhaps the first thing visitors to Taos Pueblo notice about our historic multi-level architecture is that it is multi-level — our ancestors, a thousand years ago, divided homes into stories in larger communal buildings. In a way, each story is symbolic of the other […]
SUSTENANCE The earth feeds us, nourishes us. Whether at planting time, with the help of the Corn Maidens; during the monsoon season, when the rain kachinas aid tilling and cultivation; at harvest time, the blessings and bounty extracted from the earth under the watchful eyes of our ancestors; or through the long winter months, warming […]
MUD AND VIGAS Several years ago, I took a series of photographs that I named Walls and Windows. It was an exploration of Taos Pueblo’s famed architecture up close, focusing not on the iconic “macro” imagery seen everywhere, but instead, on its constituent elements. This one had special resonance for me. The building of which […]
CORNERSTONE Summer is mudding time: It’s the time that individual families, when they can afford it, repair and resurface their homes. Sometimes it’s a whole refacing; other times, as here, it’s a structural repair. A cornerstone in the most essential, existential sense, this fresh adobe flange supports the wall of a family home while supporting […]
INTERSTICES Arbors are a traditional feature of Pueblo life, and they capture the essence of our contemporary existence perfectly. Built by hand of native piñon logs, spaced a few inches apart. Arbor “roofs” were used as drying racks — for plants, for meat, for hides. The structures provide shelter and shadow from the heat of […]
THRESHOLD I entitled this Threshold because it evokes such an ominous feeling of portentousness, of momentousness: as though once one steps through the doorway, over the threshold of the church courtyard, there will be no turning back. To a great degree, so it was, and so it remains. After 500 years, that cross is now […]
THE REAL SACRED SPACE I originally titled this Hope Lives Beyond. My focus then was on the colonizing of our lands, our soil, our spirits, the taking of our sacred red earth and using it to build a temple to a god that was not ours. Under the guise of an entryway, forcing us behind […]
BRICKS Brick and mortar. In the era of the Internet, it’s become shorthand for saying that something exists in the real world. In my world, this is as real as it gets. This was taken as part of my Walls and Windows series; it’s a close-up of the exterior wall of a home, built with […]
INGRESS/EGRESS “The act of entering”/”the act of leaving a place.” Today, our homes have doors, but that is something new, within the last century. Traditionally, the way to enter or leave our homes was through the roof. The last person to enter at night would pull the ladder down into the home, keeping the family […]
EMERGENCE It is who we are; how we came to be. It is our history and identity, captured in one image. Up from the darkened depths, rung by rung, on a ladder built of the same materials with which the spirits have blessed us. Rung by rung, out of the darkness, seeing first the warming […]
