The Blue Lantern at IAO

The Blue Lantern at IAO January 4 to February 5, 2011

Tulsa artists including, James and Yiren Gallagher, Jeff Hogue, Lee Roy Chapman, Darren Dirksen, Mark Kuykendall, Matt Phipps, Linda Wilson and Richard Baxter, Oklahoma City artist, Sam Fredrickson, and foreign artists including Amelie Junqua, (France) Richard Baxter (Queensland, Australia) and a special thanks to the many artists who submitted work for “A Book About Death” and Narciso Arguelles for his wonderful performance at the opening.

The Blue Lantern Synopsis 1

"In 1932, Jung wrote a fascinating essay on Picasso in which he connects the artist's blue paintings with the Tuat-blue of the Egyptian Underworld. He uses the word nekyia (underworld journey) for the artists' s interest in broken and fragmented images as well as his frequent portrayal of the Harlequin, which he says derives from an ancient earth deity.

The Egyptians believed in an underworld parallel to our upperworld where everyone and everything is upside down and the sky has a special underworld tint. This is a good image for where we go when our spiritual brilliance dims and we are faced with living our spirituality down within the thick textures of ordinary living. Not just an interior but a deeper world sets the stage for our spiritual progress and regress, a world that mirrors the ordinary one but is dimmer. It lies within the earth, within the earth crust in which our daily lives are lived out. On the surface it may not be visible, but to the person living in both dimensions it is seen, felt, and appreciated.

Commenting on this passage in Jung, James Hillman describes the anima or soul as a bridge between the known and the unknown. "The deeper we descend into her ontology," he writes approvingly, "the more opaque consciousness becomes. " Opaque is the opposite, of course, of what most people want from their spirituality. They seek clarity and awareness. Spiritual people like crystals, not mud. But if we sought a life thick with vitality, we might not esteem clarity quite so much. We might realize that to live from fullness is to be down close to the earth where clarity is not an option, where the sky is blue but shaded. This is spirituality, too, a necessary complement to the brilliant and clarifying spirit we seek in the other direction." *

In the Blue Lantern installation we're seeking to create a contemplative space---one that is slowed down, thoughtful and offers a safe place from which to reconsider the catastrophic events we've all been exposed to over recent decades. Being that IAO Gallery is only blocks from the location of the first major terrorist attack in the US, we feel we must embrace this fact as a central one in scanning our shared recent history.
We hope to offer entrance into an alternative perspective, a place less clear perhaps but a place that is rife with meaning and depth. As we consider the place beyond polar dualistic opposites, we consider a place where the darkness and grief of human loss might be seen with fresh eyes...eyes that take us to the center of our lives, to our souls.

*Thomas Moore, The Soul's Religion

The Blue Lantern

Synopsis 2

On the night of April 29, 1991 an inconceivably powerful tropical cyclone made landfall on the shores of the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh, devastating the country and claiming the lives of more than 138,000 people--many of whom were children and elderly. With winds of around 250 km/h (155 mph) the storm forced a 20 foot surge of water inland over a wide area washing away all that stood in its path. As many as 10 million people were left destitute and homeless.

Torrential waters devoured generations of human heirlooms and remnants of a culture doomed to erasure. Precious loved ones vanished without a trace. Scores of untold stories will never be heard again and treasures were lost for all time. All the silent voices of this sea of now forever gone human beings needs to be summoned and embraced that we might be opened to this telling and more and more prevalent experience.

It is with humble recognition that we also behold the sobering realities that transpired on April 19 only four years later--just a few blocks from the IAO venue in which our installation will be placed. While the origin and locale of these and other horrific events differ, the anguish, loss and grief are all too similar. Darkness and suffering of such scale offer profound energetic moments, openings, portals into other dimensions from which we are all generally refused and from which most of us readily turn away.

In the space of such confrontational experience we might also find quickening---a reconfirmed resolve to know ourselves, our friends and loved ones---and our world more intimately.

The Blue Lantern has been conceived as a repository for the vast and unfathomable tragedy that such events represent. The Blue Lantern has been conceived as a sacred mandala structured space for the remembrance of the faceless child victims of such horrific circumstances.

The Blue Lantern will be an immersive environment that might empower and inspire us to stillness whereby we might reflect, empty ourselves and encounter the transient ocean of shared experience that human tragedy represents.

Our collaboration (culminating in a multimedia performance and installation) although having undergone a series of transformations, has been originally conceived by Yiren and James Gallagher. For them, the shock and terror of the '91 Cyclone struck close to home. Having been raised in Taiwan, Yiren was deeply moved to learn of this catastrophe. In part due to her often difficult estrangement from her birthplace, family, and friends, she and her husband, James, wanted to devote themselves to making a work of art in response to the specific cyclone disasters of 1991. They felt that a reconstructive art work might offer opportunity to focus and to exorcise their grief while making something of value to their community in Tulsa.

In late 2008 Jeff Hogue began to dialogue with James about the concepts and themes they had explored in the making of The Blue Lantern and quickly felt a deep connection with the tone and atmosphere of the work as it was described. The Blue Lantern was originally presented to Jeff Stokes and the board at IAO under the title "A Restorative Place: The Butterfly Lantern," however the work somehow evolved into being slated, "The Blue Lantern."

One interesting and auspicious coincidence is that the expression "true blue" has long been interpreted as a symbol for constancy and fidelity and many believe actually originated with mariners, who associated the blue sky with freedom from storms.

In Chinese culture, the Lantern symbolizes the relationship between the known and the unknown---between the known environs of one's village or city and the changeless realm known as "Heaven." The Blue Lantern has been formed more as a talisman, a light offering protection and guidance to lost souls and more generally, as a place for quiet and reflection--a safe place.

In our present culture we are all given to such struggles. Ecological shifts pose an increasing threat to us all. We are all struggling to become “unlost”---to find our center--the center beyond the sea of confusion and loss that our complex and all too often destructive contemporary culture represents.

In The Blue Lantern, mysteries will be voiced by the tide of gathered elements that surround and accompany the lantern: black islands, clouds, river forms, scattered possessions and debris carried away by the current of impenetrable waters, terrifying tsunamis and the general enormity of such an event.

Objects are gathered together in seeming random fashion. In the tradition of Chinese non verbal books, the Book of Four (a book of Death) consists of five visual books: The Book of Butterflies, The Book of Crickets, The Book of Hands, The Book of Gates and The Book of Trees. The books are non literal, negative leitmotifs with resonance within the hidden poetry of nature.

The blue line is the horizon, the flood level and the boundary between the chaotic expanse of nature and the limited and familiar world of the civilized. The blue line is the line between Water and Heaven. Ultimately, gathering points to a non-specific "Butterfly" path to restoration.

In a time in which humanity has lost much of its sense of interconnectedness, reverence and radical awe--death and all that exists beyond our accepted belief systems, The Blue Lantern seeks to draw us beyond polarities and seeming contradiction into the journey of reconciliation.