Cross Currents, Proposal
Cross Currents, 2016 proposal, Texas University, Austin, Moore Street
All energy moves in waves, mostly these waves are invisible, but we sense them in the air or in sound or of course in water. We see waves at the edge of a body of water, endlessly curling and sliding up the beach or shore yet we can never capture and hold a wave.
Cross Currents is a dynamic moment of energy caught at its moment of potential. The dynamic form paradoxically gathers us inside and becomes a place to gather even as it expresses movement. Like the symbol of yin and yang, these opposing, paired forms are an amalgam of active and passive, in balance yet not static. Reaching out into space as if towards an unknown future while paradoxically gathering us in a protective embrace. Enclosed and open: the walls appear solid from the side and disappear as we look through the open tubes from the inside or back. Up close the tubes in the wall of the wave are portals that frame the surrounding landscape in a kaleidoscope of transformation.
Cross Currents is a metaphor for what the University offers: a balance of support and protection in the dynamic, challenging context of moving out into the unknown larger world with just a hint of tension as we are in the moment before action. In a formal sense, Cross Currents exists in the boundary between the organic natural world and the geometric forms of human built structures. Just as identically shaped pixels in a digital photograph can, when taken as a whole, form a rich landscape or the human face, so the identical tubes when assembled in this way create this complex organic wave form.
