MIDDLE EYE = Hudson → Frederick Edwin Church → Walter De Maria

Coccyx = Stony Point/Peekskill

Solar Plexus = Newburgh/Beacon

Heart = New Paltz/Poughkeepsie

Throat = Kingston/Rhinebeck

Middle Eye= Catskill/Hudson

Crown = Albany/Troy

PAINTING TO SEE THE ROOM

"Drill a small, almost invisible, hole

in the center of the canvas

and see the room through it."

-Yoko Ono

Hudson River view from Olana, Hudson, NY

My earth mapping project, Main Central Vertical Flow (see first post) consists of  inserting copper poles wrapped in iron wire along several chosen locations along the Hudson River, corresponding to acupuncture points on the human spine. I am giving the river a Jin Shin Jyutsu treatment, an energy healing flow. This is the tenth earth needle insertion, on the west side of the river, representing the middle eye, which has brought me to Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's landscape of the "contemplative sublime" in Hudson, NY.  

What is it that draws us to any one particular place in the landscape...and how to direct attention or mindful intention to this location. The Hudson River school of luminous landscape paintings were masters of detail and observation  and Church was considered one of the best landscape painters of his time. Driven by the transcendental philosophy of that time, writers and painters believed an individual's knowledge and experience could go beyond the self and visible world to gain a closer understanding of the spiritual, which could be found in nature.

How does one define what it feels and looks to be, in nature, on the landscape, in one's body, with more than seeing with the eyes? How does one expand seeing and feeling a place in the kind of close-up looking and intimate touching, the kind that occurs between lovers or parents and infants?

Deleuze and Guattari have named this experience as smooth space, "the space of the smallest deviation...a space of contact of small tactile or manual actions of contact." We are intimately linked to the earth; bodies inhabit places and places are lived through and by our bodies. Earth retains memory of the past invisible to us. When body and place are intermeshed with intention, the result is mapping in a powerful way.

My engagement with earth acupuncture is to create an invisible map through material substance. Utilizing a holistic perception of the forces in these substances; copper, iron, placement, intention, I arrange the copper needles/poles in particular patterns according to the philosophy of Jin Shin Jyutsu energy balancing patterns. 

Hudson Copper
42° 12' 47" N,  73°52' 25" W

My ideas force me to think about the artist, Walter De Maria and his intention with his sublime 1976 project, The Vertical Earth Kilometer. A one-kilometer long brass rod, two inches in diameter, was inserted one kilometer straight into the earth through six geological layers with only the 2" diameter top lying flush to the surface. The artwork is almost entirely hidden from view.

Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1977,  Walter De Maria

The construction and drilling work of De Maria's The Vertical Earth Kilometer, in Kassel Germany, took 79 days and cost $750,000. 

Cards, 2007 - Ian Whittlesea

Ink on card

Unlimited edition, free to take away

Void Room, 1961, Yves Klein
An empty room filled with "immaterial pictorial sensibility"

"For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes."

-Merleau-Ponty, The Visible & the Invisible