Today marks the final entry in our Monday photographic series featuring images from Wings’s recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. He entered ten images in the photographic portion of the exhibit, each mounted in a particular order, the better to tell the story he wished to share. Over the last ten weeks, those images have appeared here at The NDN Silver Blog in a seemingly-random order, as guided by circumstance and Spirit, with one exception: The tenth and final image, the one that “closed” the exhibit, so to speak, is the one shown above, which likewise closes this particular Monday feature series.
There were numerous reasons to choose this photo as the “end,” so to speak, of his exhibit, not least of which is the fact that it is an iconic image of the show’s surface subject, the Pueblo itself — the traditional piñon ladder propped against the earthen adobe wall. It’s a fundamental element of Pueblo architecture, necessary to the form and function of the pueblo-style structures themselves. More than that, perhaps, is what it represents, on multiple levels: a piece of the people’s history and identity, perhaps no longer strictly needed in most circumstances now that doors have been added, yet still used daily; a symbolic re-enactment each day of the people’s origin and existence; a representational illustration of hope bound with history; a melding of artistic and cultural elements and referents in an image of frank and stark simplicity.
There are similar reasons to choose it to close his particular series of posts, and similar reasons why it has been joined with the weekend’s series-within-a-series. Saturday’s post was devoted to this image’s counterpart from the silverwork component of Wings’s show, of a series of delicate silver pieces arrayed in a row across another significant cultural symbol, looking to me like nothing so much as the rungs of a spiraling ladder. In it, each rung glimmered in the light of the gifts each bore, gifts given up by the earth itself, evoking those tiny gifts that accompany our rising with each day to greet the sun and lighting the way upward into its more all-encompassing light.
The light itself, so central to the lives of traditional peoples, took center stage in yesterday’s post, a warm and glowing touch of the sun on a late October afternoon or the soft yet icy glow of a winter’s dawn. It governs our days and our seasons, lighting our path, blessing our crops, warming our very earth along with our souls. Its significance is never more acute than now and in the weeks and months to come, as its rays shorten in both length and duration, readying much of our world for bed beneath a blanket of snow, its autumn glow one final blessing before it weakens under the weight of winter and needs the aid of our prayers to call it back each dawn.
And today’s image, at last, links the two inextricably. Taken in that golden October light, the earthen walls warmed red by the sun, the wood weathered nearly silver, the ladder arises out of a sea of shadow, rungs barely visible, to ascend to a clear and chilly sky the color of the bluest of turquoise stones. It is, if you hadn’t already guessed, far and away my favorite image of a selection those that I love on multiple levels. But as beautiful and affecting as the other nine have been, none comes close to matching the raw beauty and simple power of this one: an image of humanity and history, of honor and hope.
But I can’t begin to do it justice in the way that Wings himself can. I’ll close with the interpretive text that accompanied its entry in the show, a summary that says it all in very few words:
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 of the red earth in the golden light as we rise.
Rung by rung, up into this world, reaching for the turquoise sky.
We repeat this ritual daily in our homes, in our ceremony, in our lives.
It reminds us that we are Red Willow, the People of Taos Pueblo, and we live in the light of a thousand years of tradition.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
Size including frame: 18.5″ by 24.25″.
$775 + $125 shipping, handling, and insurance.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
