Sometimes, an image speaks to me in ways I can’t fully explain, not in a way that allows anyone else to understand the full range of what I feel when I look at it.
This is one of those images.
It’s the flanged cornerstone of one of the other houses a few doors down from the old gallery.When we left at the end of every day, I would find my eyes drawn to this spot: to the flange itself, in stark relief; to the delicate greenery growing wild on either side of it; to the strange interplay of light and shadow and colors that defy description. Finally, after weeks of it inexplicably capturing my attention, I pointed it out to Wings, suggesting that he might want to photograph it.
And he did.
The shot was interesting, but it was one of many taken around the same time, and mentally, we both filed it away with hundreds of others. And for more than a year, the image languished — not quite forgotten, but not quite remembered, either.
Until Wings was invited to mount his one-man show at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in April of this year. He settled on Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces as the exhibition’s theme, and when the time came to choose specific photos, this one insisted on making itself known once again. We dug it out, and found that it looked quite different from how we remembered it.
Looking at the image on the screen, it looks impossibly artificial (and it looks exactly the same in three dimensions, matted and framed and safely ensconced behind glass): Photoshopped; painting over a photo; entirely a painting. But it’s none of those things. It’s an actual, unretouched, unaltered photo, a perfect image of this ancient cornerstone in the slanting golden light of late afternoon.
The interpretive text that accompanied the photo in its place in the show (and in its place here on the site) hints at historical context:
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 a cultural tradition going back more than a thousand years. The fresh adobe is still a deep and brilliant red, and on the left, bears a newly-applied patch of mud, still wet from the mason’s trowel.
The shadow cast by the light of the late-afternoon summer sun doubles the presence of the Plant Spirit, standing sentry on either side of the fresh earthen cornerstone.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
Size including frame: 18.5″ by 24.25″.
$775 + $125 shipping, handling, and insurance.
But every time I look at this image, I see new connections, new interrelationships, new contexts, new epiphanies.
Every time I see this photo, the top of the cornice instantly summons a glimmer of recognition from my past, a past I left behind long ago: It looks like nothing so much as the pointed arch of a stained-glass window in a Christian church. It’s ironic for multiple reasons, not least of which is the fact that I rejected that church’s colonizing force, long since expelling it from my existence with a feeling of the same force with which it invaded and colonized our peoples and cultures. And I’m compelled to reiterate here that it’s the church I rejected, the organized structure, infra- and super- alike, that insists on imprinting its colonialist agenda via conversion — not the teachings of a man who reputedly lived across the planet for just over three decades some two millennia ago (many thousands of years after my people had already firmly established their own spiritual traditions on this continent), and who taught that the greatest commandment of all was love. Love. Such a seemingly simple act, so betrayed in the execution (in both senses of that phrase), so utterly destroyed by the practices of colonialism and conversion.
And yet . . . the church — the Church, with a capital “C” — is here. It is firmly ensconced in the old village, indeed, in its third structural iteration. It is equally firmly ensconced across most of Indian Country in one form or another, whether it manifests as Catholic, fundamentalist Protestant, Mormon, or some other variant. But here, in this place, it takes the Catholic form, and so perhaps it is fitting that a cathedral arch or a stained-glass window should hark back to the [here] much more ancient outlines f a cornerstone that supports an entire conjoined section of old village houses. It’s perhaps also fitting that here, in its original form, it is a communal structural support, rather than a decorative artifice.
Still, the image is decorative, if in vastly different ways: the deep red of the newly-mudded cornerstone, appearing starkly two-dimensional against the adobe wall that in life is the exact same color, yet appears washed white by the afternoon sunlight; the still-wet patchwork that is yet a third hue somewhere in between; the brilliant green of the plant casting delicate dark-red shadows against wall and earth. And, truth be told, it was the effect of the tiny leaves and the dancing shadows they cast that first attracted my attention to the cornerstone itself.
When Wings gazes at the image, of course, he sees something very different from what I see. Like me, he has his own troubled history with outside religious constructs, which have cost our peoples and our own families so dearly. It’s a history that is not past, one of ancestral destruction, ongoing disruption. But when he sees this image, these are not the images it summons in his mind.
For him, it is something far more ancient than outside influences, far more solid and stable and enduring. It is, as noted above, an integral piece of community, writ small and large: both of the home to which it belongs, supporting shelter for the family within and support for the connected homes that shelter other families; and as a metaphor for the foundation, the cultural structure that supports the People as a whole, keeping their traditions and language and lifeways alive and thriving in the midst of external pressures.
And occasionally, Spirit gives an artist the chance to capture, for a single fleeting moment, such a metaphor in a single beautifully mysterious image that shows each viewer something unique.
Look at it. What does it show you?
