Correspondences: Day into Night into Day (1992)

This installation looks to the practice of alchemy as the staging ground for a confrontation of the inner self with the presumed neutral landscape. Alchemy is universally understood as a paradigm for psychological and spiritual transformation. It is a narrative composed of twelve stages of modifying the prima materia, the raw material, which finally becomes the philosopher's stone. The prima materia is never identified. It is, ultimately, the alchemist. Moreover, when the end is achieved, the narrative evaporates. The philosopher's stone breaks the cause and effect chain, revealing the preceding steps as actually existing in a synchronicity. This installation implicates my own biography, in the form of dreams and recollections, as the prima materia.

The installation consists of a progression of twelve tables arranged in the form of a spiral. Each table presents a still life that evokes a stage in the alchemical narrative. In sequence from the outermost table, there are: a mound of stones; fern leaves floating in water; a burnt house; fossils of ferns; water and mist; the skeleton of a small bird; two metal squares; a bonsai tree; two small flames; a brass canoe; yellow roses floating in water; and a spinning prayer bowl. Each table also presents a spoken narration of a dream or memory, associated with the still lifes and their underlying alchemical meaning.

The tables face a set of French doors which stand partially open. Beyond the French doors is a video projection of a winter landscape. When a viewer approaches the central table, the spinning prayer bowl, the winter landscape is interrupted by a short burst of images consisting of a flash of light, an immense figure, and extremely magnified viewers of the still life objects. The effect is that of an hallucination, a violent disruption of the outer world by the inner one, a convergence of the miniature with the gigantic, an implication of the viewer in the climax of the center, an irruption of the self in the landscape, and a dissolution of linear time in a synchronicity.