Wednesday, June 11, 2025

MEGAMAZED, Part 2

                                                        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  

https://www.johnsabraw.com/

 

   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.

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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…

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