“Path to Nine” is an investigation into structure, repetition, and the state of being as the underlying process of the refinement and evolution of things, systems, and people.
Three, six, and ultimately nine are a pointer into the mysterious. The symmetry found in them, their relationship to things in the world, and why that is so remains a mystery even at the edges of our understanding. Nine, in particular, has this unique property of being a digital root. The sum of any multiple results in itself. In a way, this fascination with the idea of returning from where one set off is a reflection of the artist’s long journey through life to return to simple form. It’s the irony of going in circles, but each iteration somehow evolves.
These ideas culminate in gold. What gold represents to the artist is multifaceted. On one hand, there is the instinctual draw to the metal. Be it through social constructs or something deeper, there is no denying the loadedness of gold today, but for Zadik, what transcends this is the idea of gold at a more fundamental level. Being a noble metal, in the scientific sense, gold is complete in its outer valence. It doesn’t take from its environment. For this reason, it is nonreactive, like the other noble metals on the periodic table. Gold is unique to us on this planet, though.
Being just the right density, it is scarce yet abundant enough for it to be functional in ancient society as well as modern. It’s a balancing act that has no equal. These qualities make gold a witness, to borrow the term. The perfect observer and carrier of ideas through time. What many people strive to become is a nonreactive, open, and pure witness to the cosmic play.
The last aspect of the work is structure. The realization that the difference between things, even identical in raw materials, the difference between something alive and dead, useful and useless, is in the structure. A priceless silicone chip can be smashed and made as worthless as sand, only having an altered structure.
Zadik, taking a simple object—almost nonsensically simple—a brick, a building unit, an ingot, and structuring it with the play around these concepts reflects a person’s pursuit of becoming—the pursuit of refinement towards perfection.
Each stack is composed of 54 ingots. Hidden inside the stack are stainless steel rods that span 9 ingots in 3 rows. For 15 stacks, there are 6 of these sets; for the final 3, there are 7, the first number to break the system. We become something new in this departure as the 7 sets represent a break from the loop.
The use of 7 to denote systems of energy and spiritual frameworks is not unique to any one tradition and, oddly enough, is found throughout the ancient world when pointing to this phenomenon of becoming something more significant than the sum of the parts. This idea of becoming something imperfect and yet perfect—becoming human—is the paradox completed.
I've always been fascinated with the structure of things. My father was a builder, and from childhood through young adulthood, I assisted him on many projects. We would take a project up to structural integrity, and then the finishers would come in. This sense of potential always struck me as we walked away from a job site. Often, much later, after seeing the completed site, I felt a sense of disappointment when the endless possibilities had collapsed down to something definite.
I've revisited the stack work over the decades as a study in structure to bring the form to its primitive state. I am always trying to distill away the idea of finishing.
In the end, the ultimate finishing is to cast this whole endeavor in gold. Transforming the idea of structure into something timeless.
Put yourself in the middle of a crowded intersection and observe. Watch the people passing, faceless, emotionless, foreign. Where is the transition point when any one of those faces ceases to be strange? How can a mob of faces look uniform and undefined, yet each one is so unique?
This question started a simple process for me to create a person void of my bias as a sculptor—my hands' tendency after forming countless faces to some unconscious ideal.
By only using elemental forces to form the most primitive structures, water, dirt, and gravity, each element, each piece of the face, is simply a loop of lifting and throwing the clay to the ground allowing the faces to emerge.
It pains us to speak in platitudes because our hopes deflate when we add nothing new to the solution space.
Everything we are, go to war for, idolize, is here because of this brilliant fire in the sky.
Solis is my mediation on the greatest platitude of all and helps one remember that the sun will rise in the morning.
