SILENCE Hib Sabin
Presented by Sto n i n gto n G a l l e r y
Š Stonington Gallery 2014 All carvings and sketches by Hib Sabin Introductory text and commentary by Tom Choi Photography by Ashley Genevieve
Stonington Gallery Located in Historic Pioneer Square 125 S. Jackson St. Seattle, WA 98104 206.405.4040 art@stoningtongallery.com stoningtongallery.com Open Daily
GALLERY STATEMENT
We are proud to present Silence, a solo exhibition by sculptor Hib Sabin. Representing Hib Sabin is a great joy and honor, and we count ourselves lucky to be able to work and move amongst his extraordinary sculptures each day. As each new body of work enters the gallery, it brings with it an astonishing awareness and intentionality that suffuses the gallery; we feel our daily routines change, our perspectives alter. Our very dreams have a different flavor during a Sabin exhibition. Sabin brings forth life from wood, and perhaps more than any other artist, his sculpture serves as a conduit between thought and tangible object, and as a connection between artist and viewer. That sacred connection is at the heart of the value of art in our lives. Over the past year Sabin exchanged visits and emails with friend, professor, and fellow philospher Tom Choi. They discussed mutual loves of philosophy, literature and mythology. The commentary by Choi, and the sculptures by Sabin are crystallizations of these conversations.
Rebecca Blanchard & Nancy Davenport Co-Directors of Stonington Gallery
THE ART OF SILENCE Usually we think of silence as quietude. But silence is also Zen, where all is as nature intended. Whether it be a life’s journey; or the cycle of birth, death, and decay; or awakening upon an archetypal dream; or encountering something that can only be described as incandescent; or rearranging the everyday sense of time and space; or feeling connected in ways unexpected, this exhibit is about that kind of silence. In this meditative state, ordinary consciousness is left at bay. Opposites melt away; no more dichotomies of light and dark, head and heart, ego and eco, parts and whole, humans and animals, sacred and profane. All is integral. In the following display, Hib Sabin’s artwork builds a fugue of silence: letting go of everyday vision, dropping into emptiness, entering spaciousness, coming into aliveness and abundance, finding no separation between the natural and the supernatural.
-Tom Choi, Seattle, 2014
the return The art here teases our senses and sensibility. As we come upon the dead raven in The Return, is this the end of the road for the raven? Is the recumbent raven a corpse, a return to nature, a death, an act of replenishment, a loss of soul, a Faustian bargain gone wrong? Or does William Blake have a point when he says death is but removing from one room to another? And which is more devastating, the sting of physical death or the selling of the soul? The raven still occupies space but it has no life. It does have clenched claws, a beak pointing at something, and a wing stubbornly unyielding.
This seems (quite) the picture of himself — nose pointed, never quite settled, always looking (but for what?) — as Jung learned from conversations he had with — and profoundly affected by — Pueblo Chief Ochwiay Biano in Taos. The chief was giving a candid portrait of the white man at Jung’s urging. It was as if a mirror was put in front of Jung by someone knowing, someone outside Jung’s milieu. And is this ending — clenched claws — what Thomas Gray meant when he penned the paths of glory lead but to the grave?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 15”h x 21”w x 14.5”d
the illusion of bondage The teasing continues, it seems, with the caged raptor, The Illusion of Bondage. In somewhat surreal and whimsical style, we see a hooded falcon, or is it the viewer who is hooded? As Erving Goffman questioned in The Asylum — who is really incarcerated and limited? On closer examination, the hood seems more like a veil than a blinder as the contours of the eyes are still visible. We know the falcon has great vision, does the hood lend it inner vision? Is the structure around the falcon a prison or a frame of reference? We know prisoners of war are able to communicate fluidly by tapping on walls. Are the raptor’s wing tips, which extend beyond the frame, signaling something of its uncontainable freedom? Should we feel sorry for the falcon or should the falcon feel sorry for us?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 19”h x 12”w x 10.5”d
through the unknown And the owl that took flight, is it leaving everything behind, perhaps, the good and the bad? In the West this might be considered an abdication. In Zen this might be thought of as wisdom (ceasing ceaseless striving). We only know the owl is aloft, probably traveling through the night. Where might it alight — if indeed it lands at all — is after all the enigma of each worthy journey. But perhaps the important step for the owl is being willing to go through the dark, the unknown. If the owl is mythic, would its flight parallel the earth but does not necessarily touch down? Is it the metaphor for a lifelong journey that does not end? C.P. Cavafy’s wonderful poem, Ithaca, about Odysseus’ journey is precisely this point, is it not? Use it all up as you journey, the poet tells us. Do not hoard for later reminisce. Live fully for that moment and not miss out.
He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sunrise. -William Blake Did Susan Sontag not lament in her essays On Photography we take pictures instead of catching the moment? We focus on the shadows rather than the sun that casts these shadows; wasn’t this Plato’s point? Is Hib Sabin portraying, perhaps with kindly mirth, the difference between the map and the territory?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 12”h x 26”w x 21”d
wrapped in silence The two owls wrapped or insulated in silence, yet sharing space, either reluctantly or by circumstance, conjure an irony. Is this the irony of pilgrims finding each other but nevertheless experiencing claustrophobia and obligation? Do the exposed wings betray their untamed nature? The bodies do not gravitate toward their own kind. Did Linus speak for us when he said he loved humanity but detested people? Enjoyed spirituality but hated religion? Is the garment a sign of piety or a cloak of hypocrisy? Is the covering in fact ribbons of gauze, to bandage cumulative wounds that have not quite managed to heal? In this confined space, the static from the silence is deafening. Perhaps? Or is this the cosmic joke, repeated over and over; we end up inescapably with whom we cannot find repose?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 16�h x 24�w x 8�d
anima As we come upon the regal woman — in the rounded shape reminiscent of Henry Moore sculptures — holding a welcoming owl; is she the Sofia we heard about, the one who is immersed in wisdom? Does her beatific smile tell us something of her journey? Did she go the way of Odysseus fighting the cyclops, Circe, Poseidon, his own ego? Or did she in her wisdom choose the interior route?
Yet here, as often in real life, the woman manages to be at ease even when yoked in a stiff contraption. Her grace belies her confinement. Is she, at another angle, the Frida Kahlo archetype who flourished despite being strapped in, strapped down? Can we draw on the saying — familiar to Tibetans — if one really gets it, one could live comfortably even in hell?
History and lore have shown many an iconic woman embracing someone special. She is often seated, in silence. Isis and Horus, as one example, Madonna and child, as another, Hatshepsut and her young son Thurmose III, is yet one more example. As far back as 6000 BC, the Minoans — possibly the oldest culture in Europe — show depictions of a labyrinthine goddess holding a child in a seated position. This pose, too, is of ease.
The contemporary smile on the woman may confirm her timeless awareness and brings her out of the antiquities. And she is embracing an owl, not a child; or perhaps the power of that bond makes no distinction or does not insist on hierarchy? That bond — call it love — and wisdom — Sophia, owl — are a potent mix. Some call it enlightenment.
She — the woman who shows up in art — has always been somewhere in our consciousness, has she not? Her gift as giver of life and love burnishes in our psyche through the ages. We know this to be true because her image does not take us by surprise. Is this not so? If her image does not always survive the test of real life, she nevertheless inspires a hopeful vision of life, does she not?
But here the appeal (power) is undeniably feminine. Is she Jung’s archetype of the timeless anima, the same label Aristotle used a couple millennia earlier — in a patriarchal culture — to denote soul? Does she come across as animating? Does she lack anything?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 20”h x 9.25”w x 12”d
the silence of awareness In the case of the two raptors facing each other, we catch Hib Sabin playing with dimensions. What size and from what distance would we be able to see the whole person?, the artist Giacometti would ask. How close must we be — and how long does it take — in order to see the person whole, a partner might ask. Is Sabin invoking the mystery of time-space here? Is this the mature raptor inexplicably finding his own youth? (Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, perhaps?) Did the youth fall out of ordinary consciousness to come face to face with his older self? Is the adult raptor — with doting look — girding the youth for his uncharted journey ahead, a journey the adult knew only too well? Because you’ve been here T’is the silent realm, No land foreign will be foreign No home will be home. You’ll always long for what you cannot see It’s there you’ll want to be. -t.c. Can we hear Arvo Pärt’s Mirror In Mirror (Spiegel Im Spiegel), reflecting ad infinitum the eternal in the temporal? (Who could put to music better the same theme of silence and spaciousness we witness in this exhibit than Arvo Pärt?)
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 17”h x 12”w x 14”d
imprinted consciousness Coming upon the two ravens seen first as three dimensional, then hollowed out into two dimensions, could we think of the intaglio presentation as the old, the fossilized, the staple of the collective unconscious — cradle for the archetypes — that has stood the test of time? And the young, caught in his own thought, a remembrance maybe of lost time from before he was conceived? Or, as Santayana was to have said, he who forgets history is doomed to repeat it. Is the young, robust raven seeking wisdom from his ancestral past and honoring those who opened the way for him? Is he fusing himself with what is hidden? Does he fathom what lies ahead?
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 14” h x 19”w x 6”d
emergence We come now to a depiction of the fragility of life, represented by a dismembered claw and a skull emerging from its former covering. A tuft of feather still clings on. It’s the transience that awaits all creatures. This dismembered raven was part of its formerly recumbent whole (The Return). But here too, there is a tension between something emerging and something decaying. There’s that eternal struggle, samsara. But its philosophy and esthetics — wabi sabi — thrive quietly in another culture. All flows unceasing, it would appear, dissolving barriers of time and geography. Was e e cummings expressing the same sentiment when he wrote life is not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis? Rather than succumbing to bleakness, is Hib Sabin showing life in death? Beauty in decay? “Death,” cried Elizabeth Browning to the ghostly force. “Not death, but love,” came the reply. In deathly silence…abundance.
Juniper, Pigments, Metal Base 13”h x 17”w x 6”d
about the artist Hib Sabin’s fascination and love of mythology and cultures is very evident in his sculptures. Among his memorable experiences has been the study of Pacific Northwest Coast Native peoples and their traditional mythology. In addition he has spent time in Uzbekistan where he inaugurated a sister city program between Santa Fe, N.M. and Bukhara, giving him a rare opportunity to absorb traditional native divination practices and art forms. While living in Mexico for three years he studied with a curandero (female shamanic healer). More recently he has spent time in Tanzania living among the Hadza, a hunter/gatherer culture. where he interacted with a people living symbiotically in harmony with nature. In 2012 and 2013 Sabin traveled to Australia becoming immersed in Aboriginal myths, particularly those having to do with creation stories relating to the Dreamtime. The fruits of this exploration resulted in a body of carvings on the theme of dreaming which were exhibited at the Stonington Gallery. For many years Sabin has been interested in shamanism and shamanic practice as it is observed by many cultures past and present. He is attuned to the connection between the human and animal spirit worlds. His cast of figures moves in and out of the spirit world and evokes a certain timelessness. Themes of transformation often appear on his work, specifically transformational moments between life and death. He does occasionally include the human figure in his artistic vocabulary while animals in his carvings are to be seen as surrogates for human behavior. Recentlyhas begun to explore aspects of existentialism, a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice and personal responsibility as expressed through the 20th century writings of Sartre and Camus, plays of Beckett and Brecht and the sculptures and paintings of Giacometti. The theme for Silence is inspired by “The World of Silence�, a slender volume by the Swiss existential philosopher Max Picard. Hib Sabin has been a practicing artist since 1957. He received a BFA in Studio Art and Art History from a coordinated program between the University of Pennsylvania and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He went on to obtain his MFA in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh. Following this period Hib continued his role as academician and became an instructor of studio art and art history at Shadyside Academy in Pittsburgh; an Associate Professor of studio art and art history at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA; and an instructor of art history at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.
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