Paradox is the foundation of Nara Park’s crumbling walls filling the Kohl Gallery. When you first walk in, it feels as if you are entering the disintegrating remains of an extensive sacred temple built of solid blocks of rose-colored marble. Jagged walls rise above human height blocking your view of the mysteries beyond only to tumble down to the floor in a confusion of rubble. The gaps in between offer enticing glimpses of what seems a mysterious labyrinthine structure.
But the coolness and weightiness of stone is absent. There’s none of mineral sparkle of polished marble, only a plasticky gleam. Solid stone is revealed as hollow boxes folded from sheets of plastic printed with a faux marble pattern. Manufactured as decorative packaging boxes, they simulate the beauty and elegance of the marble but have nothing of its weight, solidity and durability.
Park has purposefully conjured the presence of sacred space in this deeply experiential installation only to instantly undermine it. Its title, “I Was Here,” succinctly calls up the deeply human need to make a mark, to commemorate, to create something strong, stable and unchanging, but her materials infer that it’s a hollow wish.
Stone symbolizes stability and permanence. It’s the material of monuments, gravestones and temples of every faith. But while Park’s faux stone temple briefly summons its power, it’s all a charade, a fact underscored by a series of jokes. The brownish faux stone of the fallen rubble doesn’t match the blocks in the wall, and plastic tabs, the final adhesive fold holding each box together, are left visible here and there. As if that weren’t enough, the marble pattern of the blocks repeats over and over so that a darkish spot constantly reappears, making polka dots across entire walls.
Once the impression of weighty stone is left behind, the plastic itself holds a certain delight. Rigid but thin, it’s hollow inside and slightly translucent, so that the light passing through creates a pleasant glow. Thanks to today’s high-definition digital printing, the repeating photographic image of real marble lends the blocks a quality of nuanced natural loveliness. Park’s installation is beautiful but decidedly artificial, and that’s what gives it its dissonant potency.
Simulation is rife in contemporary culture. It has its merits (faux fur saves animals’ lives) and its faults (fake wood paneling can make for some very tacky architecture), but there’s the niggling worry that so much artificiality points to, even encourages, a surface understanding of life and a concurrent loss of insight into reality.
Park toys with this thought in three small wall sculptures made of bits of wood coated with stone-textured paint and layered like stone strata. These are more cerebral than “I Was Here” and seem to function primarily as intriguing studies into the curiously tactile effects of the textured paint and the rhythmic patterns of stone formation and erosion, perhaps in preparation for some future project.
The exhibit’s other smaller sculpture, “Believe,” is more thought provoking. Backed into a tight alcove, it’s a simulation of a wishing well, its sides built of more hollow blocks made from dark, faux stone wallpaper. The traditional round well is compressed into an ellipse and holds black aquarium sand instead of water. Still, there are coins lying in the sand—visitors have made wishes, and you are invited to do so, too.
The question arises (as it inevitably does even at real wishing wells) as to whether it really works. The inference is that perhaps it’s not the magic of natural stone and pure water welling up from the depths of the earth that causes wishes to come true, but the focused impulse for good things to happen. It’s an idea that fascinates Park, and she will collect the coins at the end of the show to donate to Easels and Arts, Supporting the Arts in Kent County Schools, effectively making some wishes, at least, come true.
It took Park eight days to install the thousands of blocks in “Believe” and “I Was Here,” and that doesn’t even touch on the amount of time it took for her to fold each box back in her studio in Washington, DC. That someone has gone to so much trouble to create artwork that will prick the visitor with curiosity and wonderings about the several threads of its provenance is noteworthy, in and of itself.
The blatant artifice of stacking plastic boxes to simulate a stone temple not only questions our deeply seated infatuation with our ability to manufacture simulations of nature and experience, it challenges the power of any object of human creation. To build a temple is to commemorate beliefs and culture and ultimately, ourselves. But every memorial will eventually crumble, a truth that Park emphasizes by the ruinous state of hers and the presence of thinner, gray blocks in its lowest strata, a subtle suggestion that the pink temple was a refurbishment of the remains of an earlier version.
The law of impermanence applies to everything in the physical world, from plastic to stone to the human body. Neither synthetic nor organic will ultimately endure. The final paradox is that Park’s hollow boxes aren’t empty—at least of meaning—and her wishing well may indeed be magical.
Informed by the hours of labor it took to create these works, the complex web of ideas she is pondering, and the reactions and understandings awakened in the visitors, it does seem they hold something ineffable. It’s the apprehension that belief itself has power. Just as when we believe we are happy, we will smile at others and spread our happiness, if we believe in power of art to stimulate insight, we are opening a door to let it in.
The exhibit continues through October 23 at the Kohl Gallery, located in Gibson Center for the Arts at Washington College. Hours are Wednesday through Friday 1:00 to 6:00 and Saturday and Sunday 11:00 to 4:00.
Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.
Sculpture Our Faith Endures Commemorative September
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