Cycles of Sight

text by Jay Johnston

The Transcendors alight and take flight from so many conceptual locations. Tying them to a particular conception of physics, psychology, philosophy, materiality, spirituality, or cultural history is an anathema to their existence. As with the general sign of the circle (o), the Transcendor's performance and construction process are deceptively simple - yet all encompassing, producing a depth of field which in and of itself remains circuitous. Cartographic schemas fail dismally as the ground is in perpetual evolution and contraction.The dance does not stop, and the viewer gets dizzy.

The fundamental essence of these works are disks on which black and white designs are drawn and the set 'to work' through motion. In some discs, the polarities of the abyss - black and white - create a spectrum of colour. But it takes you, your optic nerve fibres to activate performance. They dance for your pleasure through relative time and space. It is your eye's failure to fix the ceaseless movement and catch up with the essential pattern that generates the colour spectrum. Whilst with other discs your peripheral vision fights to find the pattern, even the rate at which you blink will effect your experience.

Hayes has often drawn upon Joyce's notion of the epiphany, an evanescent moment, a mutual enfoldment of the temporal and eternal through his film/video work. These kinetic sculptures continue this exploration by forming associations to the eastern mandala's project of presenting the primal vortex two-dimensionally. The black and white patterns united with motion metaphorically re/present the mandala's performance - unity of the two halves of the brain, microcosm/macrocosm, conscious/unconscious, soul/body, individual/multiple - ad infinitum. So I must beseech you with fanatic grace - Come not unto them with only the binds of ration - their trance lies at the depths of intuitive consciousness. What is perhaps the essence of the work is the ungraspable slippage of their performance, the unconscious effect they evoke for which we have no measure. I can create no authoritive delineation of this project. The Transcendors cyclic being pushes the limits of my own rational and intuitive reckoning, my thought as with my eyes, cannot hold static their transgressive motion.

I have been writing of a nothing within a something (o) that disrupts perception; highlighting an inability to perceive, to comprehend, to label, to judge, to locate, to catagorise, but allows a certain mythologising. The circle, as is apparent, has no beginning and no end. We are simultaneously held within its centre and caught at its boundary. The subjective I/eye collapses and is caught whirling dissolving and evolving with and through an ever-changing relationship to 'everything else', which in turn is continually dissolving and evolving. I am humbled by my own instability and buoyed by a promise of transformation, all the while transfixed to a point of resolution and reconciliation where all opposites disappear, left to confront the hope/fear of my own dissolution/resurrection. There is no alternative but to play within the crevice, perform a poetic two-step.

As a form of ritual hypnotism, Sufi mystics perform a whirling dance (Malawiyya.) The dance accelerates enabling the dancers to whirl away earthly binds and surrender themselves to the Infinite

Jay Johnston February 1997