Five Windows and a Gate

Five Windows and a Gate

SolwayJones Gallery, Los Angeles, 2002

The work in Five Windows and a Gate used architectural elements from classical Chinese gardens in Suzhou as a framework for examining aspects of visual
perception. In the traditional Chinese garden tracery windows and moon gates pierce the white garden walls and activate relationships between inside and outside, adjoining and distant, light and shadow, pattern and form.

The collages are full-scale versions of the classical tracery window designs made of cut photographs that incorporate elements of the picturesque and the sublime in nature as well as principles of yin & yang in which opposites are brought into harmonious inter-relationship.

Moon Gate reconfigured cut-out pieces into a 3-D mobile construction. The mobile is activated by the viewer’s motion to generate constantly changing views through and between the scenic mural, the mobile and the gallery environment. These fluctuating views accentuated the viewer’s present position in the gallery while simultaneously referring to the illusion of space in the photographic image, the mirror and the actual place of the particular garden.