Ann Isolde
In a rush towards progress in the developed world, we’re losing our deep connection with nature. The Crossroads installation in the exhibition is a meditation on this crisis.
The vertical section of the installation includes a handmade book on a pedestal in front of a column of images inspired by a backpacking trip through the Golden Trout Wilderness. This road represents a spiritual journey where land and sky, day and night, reality and dreams come together in a sacred balance with nature.
The horizontal section consists of paintings representing the four elements—air, earth, water, fire—from a technological, materialistic point of view. This road is one in which nature has literally been put up for sale on billboards for all to consume.
Must we choose one road or the other? Or can we find a way to integrate them? The challenge is learning how to sustain not only ourselves but the earth on which our survival depends.
Golden Trout Wilderness Journey
This installation grew out of a journal I kept during a nine-day backpacking trip into the Golden Trout Wilderness in the eastern Sierras. Our leader guided us in a loop through a series of meadows along the South Fork of the Kern River, then up and out through Death Canyon to a mountain ridge where we made another circle in the high country.
As our journey spiraled upward, day turned into night eight times and the moon rose to fullness. Early on the "golden trout" appeared as a symbol in my dreams. This luminous fish became a magical being weaving its way with me through the hills and valleys by day and the star constellations by night. It revealed the sacred balance in nature and taught me what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke so eloquently wrote: "One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star."
http://www.scwca.org/ar/arPage.php?m=087342&s=c