Mecca

On February 13, 2003, the opening night of mecca at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at ACAD, people collected around the pyramid as long as they could, as if it had a magnetism they couldn't resist. Even when the flickering light signaled closing time, they lingered. The attraction seemed to lie not only in the direct physical experience of the installation, which was powerful, but also in the evocation of deep-seated, layered myths. As Simon Schama writes, "Landscapes are culture before they are nature: constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, water and rock. But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea of a landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.''  

Von Tiesenhausen's strength as an artist comes from drawing on his sense of place, time and community. This installation reflected contemporary life in Calgary, and in a larger sense, the aspirations and contradictions rooted in urbanized North American culture. The foreboding of war in the Middle East compounded the mix. Embedded within mecca's strata of meaning were references to ancient myths recast in a contemporary mode. The forest, site of death and renewal, was turned horizontally to point the way. Fire, force of destruction and purification, bound a community in a ritualistic event. A sacred mountain, sign of a path to eternity, was, on close inspection, a giant multidecker sandwich of leftovers, end cuts of sheetrock destined to break down into dust at the city dump. The all-seeing eye, a numinous symbol of the Enlightenment was converted into a witness for our times.