MEGAMAZED, Part 2
MEGAMAZED, Part 2
By Tom Wachunas and John Sabraw
“… I don't know, it just makes me ask
really metaphysical questions, you know? …Lots of feels in this one…” -
John Sabraw
EXHIBIT: APEIRON – The Eco-Art of John Sabraw
/ at Canton Museum Of Art/ 1001 Market Ave. N., Canton, Ohio/ THROUGH JULY 27,
2025 / Open Tuesdays - Thursdays from 10
a.m. – 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Sundays 1-5 p.m.
https://www.cantonart.org/exhibits/apeiron-eco-art-john-sabraw-april-29-2025-july-27-2025
Measuring 7 ft x 18.75 ft x 4 ft., John
Sabraw’s Glide is absolutely spellbinding - a galvanizing,
supersensory journey into both earthly and astral dimensions. Walk all around
slowly, underneath what appears to be a boat suspended high above your head. It’s not
a solid form. It’s perforated. You can see through it, up into the gallery
ceiling spotlights. From this worm’s-eye view, and from certain angles, those
lights can sometimes seem to congeal into a single bright orb, bright like the
blazing sun. Or you can look through the stern, into the cosmos of many suns
and their planets, and see constellations projected on the wall. Preternatural
imprints of numinous presences and
forces.
What is this ethereal vessel? An excavated
fossil? A skeleton? A memory? I read this
Sabraw work to be a complex place, where manmade and natural actions could
connect to preserve environmental life, or just as readily collide to harm it. Here’s
an elaborate symbol of planet earth, engineered into an intricate and hypnotic
matrix of holes and tunnels, pits and pathways, synapses and circuits.
John
Sabraw was very generous in responding to my questions about his materials and
processes. So here’s what he wrote back to me. His words. Glide indeed. Welcome
aboard.
**************************************
Materials:
The top frame that suspends the boat is hand made of wood…The hull or
"skin" of the boat is made of Laser Felt Eco - a fabric constructed
from recycled plastic bottles…I painted the exterior with our iron oxide
pigments we make from acid mine drainage pollution - in this case I made an
acrylic paint out of our raw - or sienna - colored pigment.
The laser
cut pattern of the hull is made of two components:
1. Hand
drawn maps of the room and pillar underground mine that is responsible for the
acid mine drainage pollution currently pouring into Sunday Creek at Truetown,
Ohio - where it proceeds to 'kill' the creek for the next 7 miles. This is
where we are building our full-scale treatment plant.
2.
Patterns from the Intel Chipset: 440LX, Code Name: Balboa, Release Date: August
1997 [I could have chosen any chip really, but my daughter was born that month
and year so why not? Also, it is the first motherboard with AGP (accelerated
graphics port), and I had a Pentium at the time and may have even used this
chip to start my professional art career having received my MFA from
Northwestern two months prior.]
These two
patterns look so similar to me and are both of mankind's making to funnel
energy for our contemporary way of life [coal for the industrial age, electrons
for the computer age]. Perhaps this collage of the two in the hull is my way of
asking the question: is there some key here? A visual revelation of our
environmental scale adenosine triphosphate (ATP)? I don't know, it just makes
me ask really metaphysical questions, you know?
The final
pattern is a map of constellations that is silhouetted on the wall from a light
shown through the stern. This is from how the sky looked above Danforth Chapel
in Lawrence, KS on January 25 1992 at 6:30pm CST. The moment I got married. It
contains the astrological signs of myself, my wife, and my daughter all next to
each other - which I thought was very portentous considering we wouldn't have
our daughter for several years. I think about space a lot, having collaborated
with astrophysicists before, and I think about the universe and the big
questions a lot through that context. Lots of feels in this one…
