Subtle Centers
collaborative project created with Dahlia Elsayed
Subtle Centers is an outdoor courtyard inside an art gallery, the artwork explores the permeability between interiorities and exteriorities, prompting visitors to collectively imagine a space between the physical and spiritual world.
It is a construction that uses a large mirror in the space to create an intermediary atmosphere of both/and, introducing a present absence to evoke awareness of the illusory physical world with a suggestion of what is beyond. A tall, vertical sound sculpture that evokes a tree-like presence in the courtyard, hints at regeneration, a continual intergenerational chain of knowledge and artistic transmission. Through mirrored reflection, moving sounds, and tangible objects, the space offers an invitation from the material world for greater comprehension and interpretation of the immaterial.
Photos by Sara Stadtmiller
The poetry heard in this installation is based on the Revelation of the Divine Secrets by Sultan-ul-Arifeen Hazrat Sakhi Sultan Bahoo written in the late 17th century and translated from the original Persian by Ambreen Moghees Sarwari Qadri. A compact booklet that condenses some of the key teachings of Sultan Bahoo, it functions as a guidebook for seekers of divine knowledge. The artists used computational methods of parsing and analyzing the text to find resonant linguistic and semantic patterns. One approach uses a collection of infinitive verb phrases from the booklet, another is a permutation poem that took one phrase from the text and exhaustively recombined it. Other sequences focus on the role of the heart in the path towards spiritual insight.
Speaker carpentry by Jason Stumpf, with finishing by Neil O’Brien.
