Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Mystic Maps and Common Boundaries

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What:
Mystic Maps and Common Boundaries by Mona Shiber de Kay

Where:
Rodman Townsend Sr. Memorial Gallery (7th floor, the Candy Factory, 523-7543), 1060 World's Fair Park Drive

When:
Candy Factory through December 1

Also:

Where:
Nomad Gallery (31 Market Square)

When:
From December 6, ongoing. Artist's reception December 6, 5-8 p.m.

Mona Shiber de Kay presents Mystic Maps and Common Boundaries

by Heather Joyner

Mona Shiber de Kay's ceramic reliefs and other mixed media constructions are fascinating—and, in a sense, exhausting to look at. Relating as they do to a complex cosmology drawn from various spiritual traditions, Shiber de Kay's pieces require a certain amount of open-mindedness, if not understanding. If you think Kundalini is a type of pasta or that the heart chakra is performed on TV's ER to revive a flatliner, you've got your work cut out for you. Then again, the range of forms Shiber de Kay's subject matter assumes—including altars and sectioned wall and floor pieces—allows her efforts to be appreciated on a number of levels. As the Arts & Culture Alliance's Artist of the Month for November, she delivers big-time. It's up to us to figure out what to make of it all. �

Although it also alludes to more familiar religious concepts, Shiber de Kay's show centers on the theme of Vedic chakras (and provides details about A1LabArts' upcoming chakra project). In Hindu or Vedic culture, chakras are vortices of energy or points of contact between the mind and body. In describing them, I am bound to oversimplify matters, but here goes...the first chakra's element is earth. Also called the root chakra, it's located at the base of the spine and represents grounding and survival—our most tribal selves. For people who can see it (like local psychic Bobby Drinnon, perhaps), it radiates a divine white light. Just below the navel resides the second chakra. With water as its element, it radiates a purple light and represents emotions and sexual desire. The third chakra's element is fire, and its location is the solar plexus. Relating to personal power and will, it radiates a blue-violet and/or golden light. The fourth chakra is the heart, and its element is air. Representing relationships and compassion, rose-pink is its color, and it embodies love devoid of egoism or demands. The fifth or throat chakra relates to communication and creativity, and it resides about one inch inward from the throat. With sound as its element, it emits a clear blue color. Also called the third eye, the sixth chakra can be found between the eyebrows on the forehead. It is the center for transcendence of time and space in thinking (as in the dream state), and with light as its element, it radiates green. The seventh chakra is at the crown of the skull, and its element is total awareness. Its color is yellow, and its essence is understanding and bliss. Above the crown chakra is a kind of eighth chakra sometimes called the Kundalini serpent, and it represents cosmic consciousness or a connection with what we might think of as God.

Supposedly, when one masters a particular chakra point, certain "gifts" are awakened within, and health and being become enhanced. In the practice of hatha yoga there is a hierarchy of developmental stages, and students spend time refining the lower chakras before sequentially working upward. The above will no doubt sound like hogwash to some people, but chakras correlate with other constructs such as the Judaic Tree of Life. In the Kabbalah, for instance, the Tree of Life's three pillars, representing judgment, mercy, and equilibrium, cross eight main spheres that can be linked to energy zones (chakras) in the body. If synchronicity indeed exists between western and eastern traditions, what do such correlations mean? How can they be addressed through art?

Altars somewhat comparable to the seven Shiber de Kay presents in her show exist in most cultures. Hearkening back to ancient sacrificial rites, they can be found everywhere from backyards in Bangkok to living rooms in Bogot�. What's different about what Shiber de Kay does is that she puts them all together. Made of roughly identical crates hung on the wall, each with a sort of ceramic proscenium and pedestal beneath, they contain objects relevant to many faiths. Grouped as they are, the altars remind us that separate religions essentially revolve around the same basic notions. That fact seems particularly sad when I look at Shiber de Kay's altar related to Islam and consider divisive hatred in the modern world. "Breath of the Compassionate" features a poem by Hafiz that in part reads, "Something has happened/To my understanding of existence/ That now makes my heart always full of wonder/ And kindness." I guess most of us aren't quite there yet.

Powerful as they are, the altars do not overwhelm impeccably crafted ceramic work. "Lotus pieces" composed of seven sections have an Art Nouveau-meets-Bombay quality, and the various "wheel pieces" possess even more components (like circles within squares). The presence of a grid-based geometry suggests order, and voids in glazed clay reference infinity. Clearly, Shiber de Kay has discovered an apparently bottomless well from which she can sustain her art. My only problem with it is this: it seems to be more about the spiritual realm than it is a part of it. Transcending one's self through art is no mean feat, mind you, but something like a lone triangle vaguely ringing in a large blue space might do more to actually provoke my fifth chakra. Or, as a poet friend of mine once put it, "the genius of Dégas was not that he painted what he saw, but that he painted what would allow us to see what he saw."

The path de Kay is following may well lead her to that point. What's ironic is that if she gets there, making art about it might cease to matter.