an uncertain proposition patrick mahon , thomas mahon
Mazes are contexts where to be momentarily lost can be both pleasurably distracting and troubling; a predicament to be negotiated, where location involves much speculation. David Wagoner's 1971 poem 'Lost' 1 shows how we might locate ourselves: Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. The tiny 4 x 6" drawing by Thomas when he was eight years old shows an airplane flight that Patrick took in 2000. No negotiation, just departure and arrival and confusion in between. Both the poem and the drawing were made when our planetary environmental crisis did not loom so large. We are adding another piece, an imaginary leafy maze. Its walls are endangered plants and trees. To stop in this ordered but existentially fragile maze is a moment of incommensurability: one is neither here nor there.
Leafy Maze
p
Here Maze
Flight Maze
Patrick Mahon, artist, curator and professor of Visual Arts at Western University, is committed to art as a vehicle of contemporary expression that helps imagine transformation and fosters hopefulness. www.patrickmahon.ca Thomas Mahon, a designer and architect based in Brooklyn, has worked across a wide range of projects and media, from graphic design to urban scale initiatives and master plans, with an interest in ecology and environmental equity.
1 Wagoner, David. 'Lost' (1971) Poetry Magazine . Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2022. p 219
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on site review 42: atlas of belonging
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