A Place for Everything
Panoramic Photographs of Cosmic Architecture and Sacred
Precincts
by James Mai
The exhibition, A Place For Everything, opens with a reception
for the artist James Mai on Friday, May 9, from 5pm to 7pm, at
McLean County Arts Center. A Place For Everything will be on
view in the MCAC's Brandt Gallery through July 19, 2008.
A Place For Everything is generously sponsored by Specs Around
Town Optical Boutique/Steve and Julie Kubsch and Bloomington
Center for the Performing Arts.
A Place For Everything includes approximately twenty-five
panoramic photographs of sacred architectural sites from various
cultures, time periods, and locations, including Hindu temple,
Islamic mosque and Buddhist stuppa sites in India, Maya temple
sites in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, ancestral Puebloan
sites in New Mexico and Arizona, and Native American rock art
sites and monuments in Texas and Wyoming.
Artist James Mai creates the panoramas by digitally combining
four to ten photographs of a specific site to achieve a
90-degree, even 360-degree view. The emphasis of the photographs
is to show the manner in which such architectural sites embody a
'cultural cosmology.' This includes a culture's beliefs about
how cosmic and terrestrial spaces are related; how cycles of
time are determined by celestial motions of sun, moon, and
stars; and by specific images and stories of mythology. In
various ways these cultural cosmologies are 'encoded' in the
architectures, and often these sacred architectural precincts
are meant to be smaller models (microcosms) of the larger cosmos
(macrocosm).
James Mai is Associate Professor at I.S.U. School of Art. He
began photographing these sites in 2002. Prof. Mai explains the
project's development, "I began taking the panoramic photographs
as documentary source material for my academic research on
cross-cultural mythologies, iconographies, and cosmologies. I
had not intended to show the photographs until the panoramas
themselves began to reveal visually the phenomenological
structures of the sites. As I deepened my study of 'cosmological
architecture,' I realized that the photographs might be the most
effective way of examining the experiences of the sites
themselves. For the time being, I will allow the photographs to
stand by themselves as 'visual essays' on these sites." Prof.
Mai's project was further focused in 2004 when he received a
grant to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer
Institute in Mexico and the Southwest and study the
architectures and the iconographies of Mesoamerican and
Southwest Native American cultures.
James Mai will speak about his project on Tuesday, May 27, 7pm.
This ArtTalk is free and open to the public.
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Artist Statement, James Mai, 2008
Sacred architectures throughout the world are designed to elicit
an awareness of a cosmology, both natural and cultural, both
physical and metaphysical. Such architectures often acknowledge
the cardinal directions, the pathways of the sun, moon, and
stars, the annual calendar, landmarks in the local landscape,
even directions to historic or mythic places or events of the
past. Some buildings and precincts remake the larger cosmos in
miniature, and often are populated with images of divine beings
or ancestors from another realm. Such architectures and their
locales are designed to act upon and to reshape our
consciousness, coordinating us with the largest orders and
powers upon which we depend.
The panoramic photographs in this exhibition are the result of
my engagement with and analysis of some of these sites. I try to
look at and to move through the environments with an awareness
of the designed pathways and vistas, the scales of the
architectural masses and spaces relative to my body, the
orientation to local topography and to the quadrant-directions,
and most especially the axial lines of symmetry and the nodal
points of view from which microcosmic-macrocosmic relationships
are revealed.
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