Storm Windows an installation by Richard Jones
November 10- Dec 32,2023 no. 5 at Abel Contemporary Gallery
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Much of the ritual and story by which humans have found their
bearings in the world has at its heart the cultivation of awareness and gratitude for the deaths of the animals and plants that give us life. The need to be worthy is not just a moral aspiration, a desire for a sense of dignity or self-justification, but a practical necessity for any culture that wants to stick around. Either we make our lives a part of a cycle of gift, a reciprocal relationship with other living things, or we become an engine of depletion, bringing about a desolation from which we will not escape. The tapestry of myth carries memories of the ways that humans have ruptured this cycle and the work that has gone into mending it, time after time.
The fossil economy breaks the possibility of such a cycle. How many million years, of dying in the forests and seas of the ancient world go into one generation of living the way we have been doing around here lately? How could our lives ever be worthy of so much death? What could we possibly give back? And what would giving back even mean, when all that dying happened in the deep past of geological time? Committed to dependence on these vast, underground reserves of death, the only response that remains is to silence such questions, to extinguish the ways of living which embody them,
to make them unthinkable.
-Dougald Hine At work in the Ruins
“ I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal... let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all things.” -Alice Gull quoting Joseph Conrad in Michael Ondaatji's novel In the Skin of a Lion
I would like thank, Neeson, Sophie, Andrea and Russ for help in putting this work together, as well as Sector 67
I am deeply grateful to Abel Contemporary Galley for providing this venue, this work would not exist with out it.
I dedicate this work to all who have come before.
-Richard Jones, 9: II : 23 Madison
words given at event on Dec2. 2023
There is a great black snake circling our house now; a winged serpent, a worm, as it was named in England of old .Sprung from a well dug too deep by men greedy for both kinds of power.
A friend in High School told me that when god through Satan down the tunnel to hell , it was so deep the forsaken angel forgot to use is wings. Bill knew something of suffering, his mind twist by LSD and in and out of Dorothea Dix Hospital where they say James Taylor wrote “Fire and Rain”
Two summers ago I stood in a group of people on the shore of Lake Superior listening to a tale of what happened round here long ago, about a great battle between a thunder bird and a great black snake. But that's not my tale to tell and besides I couldn't smoke that 1500 year old effigy. Unearthed to bring its prophecy once more. Due to a plague stalking all the lands . It was just a tap on the shoulder – a wake up call..
Bit by bit and molecule by molecule this twisting swirling choking worm was birthed year by year , taking its free ride on that great growth myth that build this modern house. Now it strangles our skies and will. See it blowing smoke and yelling “ I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down” But no bricks around here ; turns out all our houses are made of glass. We look out our windows and there are oh so many, still re-presenting halcyon days. But they're rattling , banging ! Wheres that wind coming from? Certainly a storm is blowing from paradise . The center will not hold. We would like to stay and repair the damage but the snake we've mistaken for an angel of history is saddled and we can't refuse one last glorious ride.
It was asked
“ How will we survive these times ?”
The answer came from an island in the center of Turtle Island
“ Everything you need is all round you .”