Art exhibition examines infiniteness of existence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/05/2006 (7375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN his book, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, Michael Schneider writes, “The universe may be a mystery, but it’s no secret.”

The subtitle of the book is The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art and Science. Just the mere mention of mathematics makes my armpits begin to sweat and stomach clutch into a knot. But that’s the mathematics of school days, (memorized, tested, graded) not the mathematics of creation, (natural, immanent, generative).

It’s this kind of mathematics that Milly Giesbrecht turns into art at the Mennonite Heritage Gallery. Her current exhibition is titled Discovering My Original Face

In conversation about the creation of this display, Giesbrecht speaks of this process as the awesome discovery of the essential pattern in nature that is repeated over and over again. Then her face takes on a kind of radiance as she states, “This is my real baptism. The first one into belief never took, but this one has taken me.” Later she added that she was “no longer tethered to a belief position, instead this whole discovery was more like finding that she was relaxed into the universe.”

Now I have to confess that when I first read Giesbrecht’s artist statement about this exhibition I couldn’t grasp its fullness of meaning.

But then reading words about art, without the images, is always a little like studying instructions for dance and never dancing. So this is an invitation to go to the exhibition, sit in its midst and slowly let it baptize you into new awareness.

To use Giesbrecht’s written artist statement, “When I look in amazement at the face of existence, from the microscopic to the vastness of all that is, behind dogma, theology, cultural or political systems, I find myself gazing at the life force in everything and in ‘between’ in all of its rawness and exquisiteness as it evolves endlessly.

“The invisible governing principles that saturate our DNA in utter intimacy, and every breath of manifestation, is what this inquiry is about.”

I think sometimes we spend our lives running through art galleries of creation with some kind of vague awareness of a background sound that is the music of our heart’s healing, the deep tone of existence. The exploration of science, the visualization of art, and the implications for living this awareness into all that we are and all that that we do come together in this stunningly simple display.

In the photo images Giesbrecht makes it clear that there is an original pattern in all creation (the pentagon of Sacred Geometry) that is everywhere. Once we get in touch with that original pattern we can reveal our original face. It is this pattern that answers us when we cry out that primal question, “Who am I?”

The answer is in the pattern of the elements that, as Giesbrecht states, “shows up in the basic elements of existence, namely, earth, water, fire, air and space… these elements exist as reality in all that is, we are included. Therefore the world is in me as awareness… and my physical dimension is only a tiny aspect of reality.”

As I continued through the display I had a growing awareness of just how art at its most sincere level of expression seeks constantly to immerse us into the immanence and the infiniteness of creation. It calls us to be right here, right now, in order to move us into a glimpse of the infiniteness that is right here, right now. As I took in the exhibition I was struck over and over again by the fact that what I thought I could not grasp, and did not know, was something that I profoundly understood because it was there right before my eyes, and beyond that, it was in my vision of self and soul. In Giesbrecht’s words, “When I immerse myself in the view of ‘the world is in me,’ then I am that tree, rock, water and sky, energetically and in my awareness, experiencing, being immanence.”

Because I had the privilege of Giesbrecht’s presence at the exhibition I asked her how it has truly affected her. She answered from both the positive of immanence and oneness, but then she said, “It has also broken my heart, because I have seen the highest potential of who we are, and then I see what we have done to creation with destruction.”

After touring the exhibition Giesbrecht took me upstairs to show me the words of other artists she had mentored into risking vision of meaning.

I spent some time with the work of Sandy Glass, Laurie Potovsky-Beachell, and Pauline A. Braun. Each of them stepping, in their own way, outside the boundaries of normal to find the centre of meaning. Then I went downstairs again and listened once more to the toning sound of Susan Borg in front of a giant pentagon of fine fish line, and it occurred to me that perhaps this is truly the only way we will heal the world. It won’t be through our various experiments with government, religion and education. It will only be through the revelation of connection to sight and sound, art and music that dwells in all creation, and we are that creation. Only then will the immanent and the infinite meet, and only then will we stop making waste of wonder.

The artists involved in this exhibition bring their various stories to creation, and creation welcomes them to the healing strength of awareness and oneness. Science (our knowledge) and art (our revelation) meet in this place where our knowledge is not used to conquer creation but to reveal it’s baptism of us all.

Imagine creation welcoming us over and over again, no matter what we have done. Here is what we name as eternal and infinite forgiveness. It’s the embrace of a life force that will never let any one of us go. All it takes is that we trust the pattern of who we are, and risk not only the discovering of our original face, but that we show it in all it’s glory.

I will give the last words to Giesbrecht. Underneath a photo image of a rose, there are the words, “The Rose is pure even thought it receives its nourishment from the muck, it simply digests and transforms the muck.” And underneath the photo image of a peacock feather, “The peacock feather is uncontrived perfection. Its beauty and Divine nature shows up by itself without striving to fix itself.”

Transforming muck without fixing perfection is a baptism worth seeking and risking to live. Take in the exhibition. Better yet, let it take you into your own unique creation as creator.

The exhibition runs until May 27 at the Mennonite Heritage Gallery, 600 Shaftesbury Blvd.

soulseasons@hotmail.com