| This
project for the University Art Museum, Long Beach was created in response
to both the architectural as well as social characteristics of the site;
in a sense that the Museum was placed inside the library and of course was
also a part of the larger University. Garden of Secrets alludes to the symbolic
nature of language, most especially as it is experienced in poetry. At the
center of the space a fountain was encased in a house of translucent paper.
Three thousand paper butterflies, cut from replicas of Persian Sufi poetry
books, and coated with beeswax, covered the walls and ceiling of the room.
These butterflies, aloft with poetry on their wings, are symbols of thought,
discourse, and intellectual communion, just as the books from which they
are derived refer to knowledge and the museum/ library in which they are
found. Garden of Secrets, in its totality, is a metaphor for accessing,
understanding and ultimately cognizing knowledge, and language/ text as
an inspirational element (in giving one wings) along this path.
The
following text was painted, using melted bees wax, on the four walls of
the house structure.
The
house is left empty, save for the Truth, This World A Mirage by Mahmud Shabistari |