by Rafael Villares
The combined length of an adult human body’s arteries and veins exceeds 200 kilometers or 124 miles. Like the root and branch system of trees and of rivers, arteries and veins constitute a root and branch system of exchange that makes life possible.
Feeling myself to be an intimate participant in such universally recurring patterns, I find myself inventing and celebrating the following mythical calculations of symmetry: what if the branches of lightning strikes equal 80% of the root branches of the Earth’s three trillion trees; or if thirty percent of the branches of Earth’s rivers equal 1.8 million branches of lightning strikes?
What if there are 10,871 known rivers on earth and the number of all their branches equals 70% of the number the branches of lightning that have struck the earth during the past year?
What if the branches of the 100 lightning strikes that take place every second on Earth equal roughly 90% of the length of all human arteries and veins?
The Echo Morphology series constitutes a sequence of images that reveal recurring and concurring patterns within different landscapes of being. Think of someone standing at the mouth of a cave making a sound that comes back a split second later. What constitutes the unity of the identity of what the voice has articulated? The sound that returns to the speaker’s ear is not the sound the voice made. The speaker is no longer the same person who made the sound. Breathing is a conversation in which we give and take life through patterned inhalations and exhalations. This is so fundamental that it goes unnoticed.
My Echo Morphology series locates images of such hidden interchanges to try to imagine an ongoing dialogue between all structures in the universe. These pieces reveal linkages between landscapes of being through repetitions in form and the transformations and returns that take place through them..
The flow of recurring forms raises an interesting question. Is the symmetry we experience a self-confirming function of our apparatus of perception or the confirmation of an actual symmetry and unity of being?
Echo #23 (Mississippi, Alabama and Bravo Rivers falling on Havana)
Photograph. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Baryta Paper 350. 2015 (Click to enlarge)
Echo #8 (Mississippi river falling as a lightning over Havana, Cuba)
Archival Inkjet print. 2015 (Click to enlarge)
Echo # 10 (Lightning bolt in Havana, Cuba – tree root, Portland, U.S.A.)
From the Echo morphology series
Tree fragment and light box. Installation, Variable dimensions. 2016. Col. Lewis & Clark College, Portland, USA.
Echo # 10 (Lightning bolt in Havana, Cuba – tree root, Portland, U.S.A.)
From the Echo morphology series
Tree fragment and light box. Installation, Variable dimensions. 2016. Col. Lewis & Clark College, Portland, USA.
From Top left corner: (1) Yangtze River Basin- meningeal arteries – lightning bolt in South Africa – roots from Helonio plant (2) Arteries and veins of the heart – lightning bolt in Arlington, USA – roots from Rosemary plant– Mackenzie River Basin (3) Amazon River Basin – grass roots – Cerebral arteries – Lightning bolt in Río de Janeiro (4) Roots from Acacia tree – Lightning bolt in California, USA – Cauto River Basin – veins from the lower leg (Click to enlarge)
Ink on cardboard. 160 x 120 cm. 2015. Col. Minneapolis Art Institute, USA