Ad Hoc Art

****YOU CAN SEE IMAGES FROM THE OPENING**** go to our Shows/Events page and click on Buxtonia/PMP Events!

Buxtonia {Garrison & Alison Buxton} presents Unified Love Movement

Opening Reception: Friday, October 9, 2009 / 7.00pm – 9.00pm
Exhibition Dates: October 9 – December 5, 2009

Address: Mainsite Gallery / 122 E. Main St / Norman OK 73069

Mainsite Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Oklahoma-born artists Garrison & Alison Buxton. Currently Brooklyn-based, 2010 has the Buxtons embarking on a long-term project featuring an art, design, and living center based on environmental responsibility and ecological sustainability in the Green Mountains of Vermont.  This is Garrison’s second show at Mainsite and Garrison and Alison’s first major installation at the gallery.

Unified Love Movement is the culmination of years of thought, reflection, and observance of our collective existence on our shared home, earth.  For the majority of human existence, our species lived within the constraints of the natural world, in relative harmony with the other earthly inhabitants.  With westernized thought & expansion, colonialization, and the concept of manifest destiny arose the notion that the earth and its resources are here to serve humans, god’s chosen people made in his image, and it is our duty to use the earth’s bounty as we see fit.  Unfortunately for believers in these ideologies, they have been mislead.  Humans can never triumph over nature and its constraints for we are a part of it, one and the same, inextricably entwined.  Since our well being and existence directly correlate with the planet’s well being and its ability to sustain life, it is obviously in our best interest to reprioritize our ideologies, harmonize with nature (and therefore ourselves) and relearn how to live within ecological limits that are healthy and sustainable for the greatest number of life forms, not just our own.

To unravel the complex mental and spiritual knots that tie and bind the perceptions, mindsets and outlooks resulting from one’s cultural conditioning, sometimes many years or even decades are necessary.  By the time one is old enough to realize the duping of one’s consciousness via the charade of our contemporary culture and mass media, breaking free of powerful dogmas steeped in contradictions, exploit, and hypocrisy can be very challenging.  Religion and spirituality are key parts of this widespread social brainwashing.  How many of us grow up being exposed to many different belief systems and their believers, thinking about them critically, and then being allowed to choose what we feel best reflects our own worldview?  Not many, from what we have seen and heard.  The default motion is that we are born into and assimilated by the belief system of one or both of our parents.  Be they Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Indigenous, or any other, the parental persuasion is rarely neutral.

The truths at the cores of these belief systems are the emphasis of Unified Love Movement.  The installation has various disciplines simultaneously at play, comprising works on canvass, prints, and sculpture as well as bleeding-edge digital technologies and video projections.  Numerous artists have collaborated in this project, sharing their talents to exponentially expand the strength of the exhibition.  It would not have been realized in the same manner without their skills.  The central sculpture features a circular band housing Dennis Creedon’s deft trompe l’oeil painting as well as Leo Villareal’s simply stunning LED artworks.  Above Creedon and Villareal’s works, Scott Draves’s sublime Electric Sheep projections emanate along the cylindrical screen.  Light, pattern, and movement were three of the best ways the Buxtons thought to describe the transcendence towards the divine.

Unified Love Movement’s purpose is not to control or limit thought and ideas, but to inspire inquiry, reflection and mindfulness about one’s self and one’s place in our current existence as well as the grand scheme of things. The installation is about openness and expansiveness, not about confinement and limitations.

Unified Love Movement is the Buxton’s’ most ambitious, exciting project to date.  It invites and encourages the viewer to actively participate in the experience as well as contribute to its spiritual diversity and expansiveness.   The floor plan of the installation is a sacred geometric shape called Metatron’s Cube.  Metatron, an archangel and divine transmitter, supposedly forms he cube from his own soul.  The cube contains 2-dimensional images of all five Platonic Solids and many other primal forms. The cube has six points around its perimeter, each point being occupied by a human figure.  Unified Love Movement presents five figures on five canvasses to occupy five of the six points of Metatron’s Cube, with the viewer occupying the sixth point.  Each canvass’ contemplative figure is of a different belief system that the others.  Each figure is facing the center of the gallery, sending their energy, thought, and prayer towards an iconic image opposite them, symbolizing the godhead of his or her respective belief.  Opposite the viewer is a mirror to reflect the omnipresent divine nature existing within each and every one of us. The soundness of the geometry and the installation is completed through the viewer’s participation.

To the sides of the mirror as well as each godhead glow LED light sculptures in the shape of Metatron’s Cube, reflecting and referencing the shape of the larger installation.  Shining above of the LEDs and godheads, projectors send fountains of Electric Sheep radiating upwards and outwards, completing the energy exchanged in the cycle of belief: energy is sent to the divine, the divine sends the energy back to the believer.  This cycle is one that has been happening for thousands of years and will happen for thousands more, or as long as we are around to play our part in it.  The challenge we face as a species is to create sustainable relationships that benefit all planetary beings and to focus on our overwhelming similarities rather than our minute differences.  We have to have a belief in something truly greater… ourselves.  Together we can create the great change necessary to heal our culture.  Divided we are more easily conquered.  Buxtonia hopes that you are inspired to participate, reflect, and assist in blazing a trail towards a new era of cooperative and sustainable existence.

- The Unified Love Movement -