Revealed Lines in an Ancient Tree
Infinite Space–Unknowable
Cedar, 8 x 9 1/2 x 3′, 2007
Toshi Makihara Performance – Video
Exhibition:
— Borowsky Gallery/Gershman Y, Philadelphia, PA, 2007
— James Michener Museum of Art, Doylestown, PA, 2008
Fall of Snow – Still
Painted Cedar, Wood, 7 x 7′, 2008
Borowsky Gallery/Gershman Y, Philadelphia, PA, 2007
One oak leaf tumbles,
Sails, Spirals, swirls to the ground.
Slow.
In its own world. Rest
Bench and Wall Poems, Cedar, 1½ x 5 x 3’, 2007
Exhibition:
Borowsky Gallery/Gershman Y, Philadelphia, PA, 2007
James A. Michener Museum of Art, Doylestown, PA, 2008
Miriam Seidel, Borowsky Gallery/Gershman Y, Curator 2007
For the Zen student, any object of quiet contemplation can be a doorway to deeper understanding. But such a thing, whether it is a rock garden, a tea ceremony, a painting, or a koan—an unanswerable question provided by the teacher—is only, as is said traditionally, “a finger pointing at the moon.” If the student gets too caught up what is being contemplated, it’s like becoming entranced by the finger, and missing the moon beyond.
James Fuhrman’s sculptural environment holds a monumental form in wood, a wall piece of wood, and some haiku-like texts the artist has written. But it also has a place for sitting, an enveloping color on the walls, and the spaces created between the pieces and the viewer. Fuhrman’s sculptural work reflects his fascination with the Japanese concept of ma, or the silence and space between things. If this installation were a koan, it might ask, which is more solid, the monument or the air around it?
In an earlier series, Fuhrman created intensely gestural, calligraphic forms, created in steel and embedded in rock-like concrete: enigmatic messages, both energetic and serene. More recently, a series of small pieces in cast bronze placed stone-like forms in intimate, delicately calibrated relations, as stones might meet in a rock garden. The dance of space and object, of something and nothing, is one he has practiced, and offers here. Enjoy the finger, but don’t forget the moon. –Miriam Seidel, Borowsky Gallery/Gershman Y, Curator 2007
Next: Architectural Scale-Connection