Sculptural Installation, made of recycled nylon stocking and PVC, 16’ x 4’.
Commissioned by the National Hispanic Cultural Center as part of a group show, Because It’s Time: Unraveling Race and Place in NM , a full description of which you can read here. For catalogue purchasing information click here.
Artist Statement: Spiritus Mundi unfolded from an ongoing conversation with my creative collaborator, artist Eliza Naranjo Morse. The creation of this work arose from asking ourselves questions about what it means to be and what it means to belong.
Approaching this project from a universal perspective, I have come to recognize that we are all living under the same sky. We share an almost identical genetic code--regardless of skin color, hair texture, the color of our eyes, gender, sexual orientation, education, socio-economic background and ethnic or cultural identity. Not only does our genetic coding link us to each other, but it also links us to every other organism on Earth.
Spiritus Mundi, a Latin phrase meaning “spirit of the world”, is a term made famous by W.B Yeats to describe the collective soul of the universe containing the memories of all time. This work was created from this essence, bursting the invisible lines— geopolitical or imagined— being drawn around us, as well as those very real fences and walls created to divide and define us. The physical form of Spiritus Mundi (the double helix) unfolded from both its meaning and the first stanza of Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand...
-Passage from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1919
Caoba’s Smoke and Mirrors series shows a masked man in a suit posed in expressive gestures, like a dancer. The masks he wears are animal faces concealing his true identity and suggesting personae that can be taken on and off like garments. The work suggests that the animal states from which people attempt to divorce themselves are an inseparable part of human nature — no matter how fine the cut of our suits. The underlying feeling in these images is a haunting, unnerving one of mystery, in which
identity itself is a question mark. There is an internal conflict where man seems to struggle against a nature from which he can never truly be breached.
-Michael Abatemarco
