STYLITE
Maxon Higbee
27.09.2014 - 29.10.2014
‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, and space is what prevents everything happening to me’.
John Archibald Wheeler’s quote playfully extends his notion that we live in an observer’s universe – the ‘bit’ created from the ‘it’. An observing No answering a defined Yes. This posits the idea of a being sensing itself and its loneliness, and through a process of desire and fear initiating a program of splits ultimately creating a vast unknowable universe. Knowing is an important issue here as Maxon Higbee’s work deals with the attempt to experience or see outside and beyond an existential horizon, and to rediscover the unknowable that has separated us from ourselves.
There is a scope of particular knowledge presented in Maxon’s work. He takes the history of the ‘pillar saints’ as a literal stepping off point to ruminate on the conjunction of subjectivity, esoterica, time and space. In this exhibition the culturally liminal moment of late antiquity forms a backdrop for this process. Maxon is definitely a ruminator - perhaps a truffle hog using his finely tuned senses to plough up probable and improbable truths.
The work at Maquis Projects may seem to necessitate a gnostic perspective for the viewer also, but I don’t believe this to be the case. As with GK Chesterton’s Father Brown reason, faith and intuition are all we should need to become embedded observers. Maxon asks us to complete an action representing the moment where a split occurs between ourselves and the other, and to acknowledge our own fear and desire at that moment. However, as the universe and our knowledge expand, does our fear deepen and can we be overwhelmed by time and space - itself the sine non qua of our subjectivity. And can our desire be confounded?
‘But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?’
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125
Tom Keogh
Maxon Higbee
27.09.2014 - 29.10.2014
‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, and space is what prevents everything happening to me’.
John Archibald Wheeler’s quote playfully extends his notion that we live in an observer’s universe – the ‘bit’ created from the ‘it’. An observing No answering a defined Yes. This posits the idea of a being sensing itself and its loneliness, and through a process of desire and fear initiating a program of splits ultimately creating a vast unknowable universe. Knowing is an important issue here as Maxon Higbee’s work deals with the attempt to experience or see outside and beyond an existential horizon, and to rediscover the unknowable that has separated us from ourselves.
There is a scope of particular knowledge presented in Maxon’s work. He takes the history of the ‘pillar saints’ as a literal stepping off point to ruminate on the conjunction of subjectivity, esoterica, time and space. In this exhibition the culturally liminal moment of late antiquity forms a backdrop for this process. Maxon is definitely a ruminator - perhaps a truffle hog using his finely tuned senses to plough up probable and improbable truths.
The work at Maquis Projects may seem to necessitate a gnostic perspective for the viewer also, but I don’t believe this to be the case. As with GK Chesterton’s Father Brown reason, faith and intuition are all we should need to become embedded observers. Maxon asks us to complete an action representing the moment where a split occurs between ourselves and the other, and to acknowledge our own fear and desire at that moment. However, as the universe and our knowledge expand, does our fear deepen and can we be overwhelmed by time and space - itself the sine non qua of our subjectivity. And can our desire be confounded?
‘But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?’
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125
Tom Keogh