James Mai 

A Place For Everything:  Panoramic Photographs of Cosmic Architectures and Sacred Precincts

May 9 – July 19, 2008                     Brandt  Gallery

Opening reception, Friday, May 9, 5-7pm

Sponsored by Steve and Julie Kubsch and the Bloomington Cultural District

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.

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.

“Curiouser and curiouser!”       

Group show featuring artists who allude to narrative elements of transformative tales in their work, participating artists include Pattie Chalmers (Carbondale), Bill Conger (Peoria, Illinois), Mark Forth (Bloomington, Illinois), Alice Hargrave (Chicago), Miranda Lichtenstein (New York), Carmen Lozar (Normal, Illinois), Kim Pace (London), Frank Pollard (Bloomington, Illinois), Karen Reimer (Chicago), Marnie Weber (Los Angeles), and Karen Yasinsky (Baltimore); media includes painting, collage, drawing, glass, textile, and video