In its initial are living and in-man or woman effectiveness given that prior to the pandemic, the New Gallery Concert Collection (NewGal) offers an immersive tour of art and new music, checking out themes of adoption and adaptation. On Saturday, April 30 at 8 pm, Undertake and Adapt will welcome audiences to consider an active journey roaming visible and musical installations at the Longy School of Audio. Performances and artwork installations uncovered in the course of the rooms of the historic Zabriskie Home are intended to mirror the encounter of currently being adopted-into a household, into a region, into a person’s accurate self-and to evoke resilience, belonging, and empathy.
The program facilities on the operate of 3 neighborhood creators-visible artist Sharon Berke and composers Maria Finkelmeier and Jonathan Bailey Holland-who are developing by way of the lens of their own adoption experiences. A numerous group of artists-which include composers Fred Onovwerosuoke and Sarah Hennies, pianist Sarah Bob, cuatro player Fabiola Méndez and her trio, The Fisher/Lau Job, and percussionists Steph Davis and Aaron Trant-will broaden the concert’s topic by checking out the complexities of finding and adapting to one’s accurate id.
“NewGal exists to elevate new will work of audio art along with the living composers and artists who produce them,” states the organization’s president Sarah Bob. “No matter if another person has joined a new family members, moved nations around the world, or uncovered a new section of themselves, Undertake and Adapt invites curious listeners and adventurous art lovers to traverse the complexities of id as if it were a home of unlimited rooms.”
Through the night, concertgoers will regularly come upon will work from artist Sharon Berke’s Rearrangement sequence. These paintings and collages are research of duality, household, relatives, separation, connection, and belonging-all deeply personalized concepts to Berke, who was adopted at start. Her operates are abstractions of domestic scenes and serve as individual narratives for the artist, who states that each piece reflects her possess continuously evolving self-recognition.
Adapt and Adopt commences in Pickman Hall with the planet premiere of Jonathan Bailey Holland’s String Quartet No. 4, for string quartet and recording, which explores the distortion of time and narrative that accompany assimilation. The composer worries the audience to talk to thoughts: What does the approach of adoption and adaptation do to the idea of memory or history? How is a narrative designed when the connection to the previous is no lengthier recognised? The quartet will attribute Gabriela Diaz and Lilit Hartunian on violin, Ashleigh Gordon on viola and David Russell on cello. As the string quartet fades, the audience’s self-guided journey as a result of the tunes and artwork installations in the Zabriskie House starts.
In just one home, audiences will uncover Sarah Bob undertaking options from composer Fred Onovwerosuoke‘s The Twenty-Four Scientific tests in African Rhythms. Born in Ghana to Nigerian dad and mom, the award-profitable composer grew up in both nations around the world and traveled by about 30 African countries in advance of settling down in Saint Louis, MO, and founding the Intercultural Music Initiative. Onovwerosuoke’s songs is informed by a life span of adoption and adapting to new environment, even though remaining accurate to his roots. The 20-4 Reports in African Rhythms attract inspiration from unique dances and musical patterns discovered throughout the continent.
In a different room, concertgoers will uncover Fabiola Méndez and her trio accomplishing parts from her album “Afrorriqueña” (Afro-Rican). The album is motivated by her expertise as a Black Puerto Rican lady and celebrates the satisfaction, joy, difficulties, and self-acceptance that will come with adopting and adapting one’s genuine identity. Fabiola Méndez Trio will also accomplish selections from Mendez’s album “Al Otro Lado del Charco” (On the other aspect of the pond), which characteristics audio motivated by the thought of leaving one’s homeland in search of new chances and advancement.
Audiences will also discover percussionists Steph Davis and Aaron Trant doing composer Sarah Hennies‘ do the job Settle. Hennies’ minimalist piece enables two vibraphone gamers to adopt and adapt their artistic interpretations of the operate primarily based on their modifying bodily or psychological house. Their compositions typically discover musical, sociopolitical, and psychological concerns which includes queer & trans id, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological circumstances fundamental creative thought.
Undertake and Adapt culminates with the globe premiere of percussionist, composer, educator, and general public artist Maria Finkelmeier‘s hottest installation, the Me you See. Built for a significant, versatile ensemble, the Me you See encompasses all the performers on the application. The get the job done starts with an on-stage efficiency by present-day percussion songs duo, the Fisher/Lau venture, who are step by step joined on phase by extra performers all over the new function. In the course of the functionality of the Me you See, a stunning movie projection will showcase a model new collage developed stay in the course of the functionality by visual artist Sharon Berke.
Tickets for Adopt and Adapt are out there online for amongst $10-$20. All attendees will be essential to present their ticket and proof of vaccination (such as booster shot) upon arrival. Masking is optional and supplemental COVID data related to the Longy University of Audio is out there listed here. Adopt and Adapt is made probable by funding from Are living Arts Boston by The Boston Foundation.
IT WAS VULGAR & IT WAS Attractive How AIDS Activists Made use of Art to Combat a Pandemic By Jack Lowery Illustrated. 422 pages. Bold Kind Textbooks. $35.
The revolution would not be televised, but slathered with wheat paste.
Do not underestimate the significance of this starchy makeshift adhesive in the history of AIDS awareness — back again when a “poster” was not someone composing anonymous feedback on line but community relations on paper, in the real town square.
As described in Jack Lowery’s new reserve, “It Was Vulgar & It Was Attractive,” wheat paste was a thing like a holy compound for activists, enabling the circulation of their righteously angry artwork. They hired a “snipping” corporation with attainable ties to the mafia to stick up posters around Manhattan that bore pink triangles taken from the Nazis’ image for homosexuals: inverted mainly because of an organizer’s defective memory but hunting boldly intentional. The posters’ tagline, “Silence = Death,” turned as very well-recognized in the cultural capitals as a Coca-Cola or McDonald’s slogan.
Wheat paste also backed the a lot less-remembered “He Kills Me” poster, which confirmed then-President Ronald Reagan smirking in evident indifference to the speedy unfold of AIDS. And the “Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head” poster, which featured a naked, erect penis, a command for condom use and a warning that the disease kills ladies far too. (This imagery was a minimal far too significantly for several passers-by, who typically tore it down.) A massive billboard questioned rhetorically: “When a government turns its back again on its persons, is it civil war?” Turns out you should not use wheat paste to put up a heavier billboard in the chilly. The paste froze and this individual piece of signage “crumbled into a unhappy heap at the foundation of the wall,” Lowery writes.
His e-book focuses on the Gran Fury artwork collective, an offshoot of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Electricity (ACT UP), which itself experienced been started out of frustration with current businesses that were being not adequately radicalized in opposition to a rapidly-going, deadly ailment decimating an overall era of gay adult men. The logistics guiding demonstrations — the cellphone trees and accounting and pizzas — would not appear to be the most scintillating content, but Lowery painstakingly reconstructs conversations and negotiations that compel a reader to really feel the era’s anguish and urgency. Considerably of the collective’s work now hangs in major museums.
Jack Lowery, the creator of “It Was Vulgar & It Was Attractive: How AIDS Activists Utilised Art to Battle a Pandemic.”Credit score…Gregory Wikstrom
Gran Fury was named for a design of Plymouth car then made use of by the New York Town Police Office. The phrase somehow “insinuated a kind of fabulous outrage,” Lowery writes, and sounded gothic, like a Tennessee Williams perform. “Our fury was grand,” Donald Moffett, a graphic designer and one of the nine surviving main associates of Gran Fury, told the author. Lowery interviewed them all and drew from an unfinished memoir by the tenth, Mark Simpson, who died in 1996.
Like the artist Barbara Kruger, who taught one member of the group and whose typeface they swiped for their “Read My Lips” sequence, Gran Fury reappropriated the perfectly-oiled and from time to time absurd patois of American promotion and branding. This was social media just before the world-wide-web. Much from crumbling in a unhappy heap at the base of a wall, the team was solidifying, mobilizing and furiously fighting.
All white but for 1 member, Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, the creators of Gran Fury confronted the elite on its own turf: repurposing foamcore gross sales indications from Barneys for percussive protest shutting down the stock exchange applying faux Bear Stearns badges and currency (“people are dying though you play business”) and stuffing New York Times vending boxes with pointed spoofs named The New York Crimes. “Bloody” paint handprints began to clearly show up on pavements and windows, trailing elected officials who, the demonstrators argued, have been proficiently guilty of murder.
Lowery is younger — this challenge begun as his master’s thesis at Columbia — but writes like an outdated soul, scholarly and indignant at how AIDS was for so many several years minimized and marginalized. At times he permits himself an exclamation issue of delight or gentle sarcasm. (“Most innocuous certainly!” he writes of a banner reading through “All Men and women with AIDS Are Innocent,” a rebuttal of the plan that the disorder stemmed from immoral behavior. “Gran Fury even received a prize!” he writes about the awarded “Kissing Does not Kill” poster, which highlighted an array of numerous partners mid-smooch numerous at the time mistook it for a Benetton advertisement.)
But generally “It Was Vulgar,” the title taken from an additional of Moffett’s pronouncements, is a deeply sober story about a vulnerable inhabitants, frequently turned down and failed by their start families, their health treatment program, their civic leaders and even occasionally by each other, suffused with grief and dread.
“The closet is turning into a coffin,” wrote Avram Finkelstein, a hairdresser, “self-described Machiavellian propagandist” and Gran Fury member, in a 1986 journal entry. Compact information give the activists’ trajectory a novel’s momentum: the worthless garlic get rid of attempted by an early AIDS patient the Gouldian finches that Simpson housed in his Brooklyn condominium his shrinking from the sunlight like a vampire the beef blood that pooled and froze in the avenue in the Meatpacking District just before gentrification. Eventually, strategies escalated. As 1 member place it, “wheat paste usually means you are marginal.”
Lowery is cautious to doc pockets of camaraderie and even joy in a harrowing time. As he writes: “It wasn’t just people today nervously palpating their glands every single 10 minutes.” There is a confrontation with the pope, but also a occasion at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice. We see Tim Bailey, a men’s put on designer and member of the Marys, an additional of ACT UP’s affinity groups, car-dancing to Taylor Dayne’s rendition of “Can’t Get Plenty of of Your Love” times prior to the thwarted staging of his political funeral in Washington, D.C.
“It Was Vulgar” isn’t fantastic — this critic wished to get out a blue pencil anytime Lowery overused the phrase “ultimately,” sometimes numerous instances on a website page, and his endnotes are scant. But it is an significant contribution to the annals of AIDS, and, in hewing shut to but fanning out from a slim solid of people, a sturdy template for chroniclers of elaborate sociopolitical actions.
Instead of splattering onto soil and oozing into the ground, as it would have done a half-millennium ago, the droplet lands on a roof, road or parking lot. From there, it zips along one hard surface to another. Until this tiny traveler finds a larger body of water — a ditch, a creek, the Potomac River — it is fair game for any pollutant that wants to tag along.
Landscape architect Kelley Oklesson, kneeling, confers with (standing, left to right) Maureen Robinson of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, neighborhood activist and gardener Jean Lee Cole and landscape architect Maya Mule during training for the Chesapeake Landscape Professional program.
Dave Harp
And that’s why, as far as the Chesapeake Bay is concerned, cities and towns are vast pollution factories, said Kelley Oklesson, a landscape architect based in Hyattsville, MD.
“Water moves downhill, so as it moves, it picks up a lot of things … that can go with it, like heavy metals, oil and trash,” she said. “And then it just continues to go to the low point, and that’s our Bay.”
For Oklesson, it isn’t enough for a client’s yard to look pretty. It must also be designed to prevent raindrops from destroying the fragile health of the largest U.S. estuary. So, she incorporates into her designs things from nature to capture and filter stormwater before it leaves the yard or garden.
Where did Oklesson gain the knowledge and skills to pull off such Bay-friendly projects? Not from her college degree, or even from a decade of experience in the landscaping industry. It mostly came, she said, from the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional certification program, which provides training for designers, installers and maintenance personnel in the landscaping field.
Since its inception in 2016, the program has certified more than 800 professionals in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia. The first class in Delaware began meeting earlier this year.
Reducing pollution from urban and suburban stormwater is one of the most important and ambitious aims of the multistate and federal Bay restoration effort. The training program’s leaders say they work to ensure that a qualified workforce is available across the 64,000-square-mile watershed to help carry out that objective.
“It’s a living system you’re installing,” said Joyce Kelley, a landscape designer and one of the program’s instructors. “There’s nothing worse than these projects that go in that [cost] several hundred thousand dollars that look terrible in five years or get mowed over.”
Making progress
In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a “pollution diet,” officially called the total maximum daily load, aimed at making states more successful and accountable in the regional effort to clean up the Bay. The TMDL outlines limits for the amounts of pollutants each jurisdiction could send downstream. That set into motion a renewed cleanup effort with a 2025 deadline.
Kelley Oklesson (left) talks with neighborhood activist and gardener Jean Lee Cole at the Contee-Parago park in Baltimore. Oklesson worked with the area residents to redesign the park and will oversee the work of volunteers who will plant native species there.
Dave Harp
The Chesapeake Bay Program, a federal-state partnership that oversees the effort, recognizes more than 400 pollution controls, known as best management practices or BMPs, that landowners can use to reduce water pollution. They can take many shapes and sizes — rain gardens, pervious pavers and bioswales are just some examples — but the general idea is the same: slowing drainage toward the Bay, giving pollutants like nutrients and sediment the means and the time to separate from the water.
Installing a BMP, though, is only the first step. Each state is required to track the BMPs and verify that they’re achieving their pollution-reduction goals. That means they must be maintained properly throughout their life cycle to continue receiving credit toward the cleanup.
The maintenance responsibility falls to whoever owns the property — whether it’s a hospital, public school system, town government, private landowner or homeowners association.
A 2012 study commissioned by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission found evidence of tens of millions of dollars worth of BMPs already installed on private properties in Virginia — but nothing to indicate whether those practices were installed properly or are being maintained.
The study led to a statewide summit of industry, environmental, governmental and academic leaders. One of their top recommendations was to “build an effective and integrated network of powerful water quality and stormwater experts and advocates.” Afterward, members of the Virginia-based group Wetlands Watch, the author of the BMP study, began building financial and technical support to launch what became the Bay Landscape Professional program.
“Early on,” said Shereen Hughes, assistant director of Wetlands Watch and the Virginia coordinator of the landscape training program, “we saw that these stormwater practices were being implemented across the watershed to meet the TMDL. But when you look at those practices, they’re not always being maintained.”
It was not a problem confined to Virginia. In 2014, the Bay Program’s Local Government Advisory Committee, whose members include local officials from around the watershed, said that increasing the pool of qualified employees and contractors to carry out restoration and protection projects was one of its top priorities.
“There’s a disconnect in the maintenance,” said Beth Ginter, executive director of the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council, which co-manages the program with Wetlands Watch. She said she has too often seen property owners receive hefty grants to install a BMP, only to allow it to fall into disrepair because they lack the funding and expertise to maintain it.
Beth Ginter, executive director of the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council, directs a Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional certification class in Seaford, DE.
Jeremy Cox
Brent Jett, a senior project engineer with the firm George, Miles and Buhr, said some of his own projects have deteriorated across the Delmarva Peninsula for lack of proper care.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “You understand budget constraints and man hours. You hope for the best. But at the end of the day, it’s not your money and it’s not your land.”
An education in dry ponds
On a sunny and chilly February morning, Jett guided a group of about a dozen maintenance professionals on a driving tour in and around Seaford, DE, a former manufacturing hub in the southwest corner of the state. Once known as the “Nylon Capital of the World,” Seaford these days derives most of its economic vigor from its community hospital, a Walmart and a recently opened Amazon distribution center.
Brent Jett, a project engineer with George, Miles and Buhr, talks about a stormwater pond with participants in the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification program in Seaford, De. Jett said some of his stormwater projects on the Delmarva Peninsula have deteriorated for lack of proper care.
Jeremy Cox
None of those institutions were on the tour. Instead, the itinerary included stops at a bioretention pond and bioswale outside a Catholic church, a fenced-in pond behind a government services building, and a “submerged gravel wetland” beside a medical office complex, which turned out to be a rock-strewn low spot tucked into a narrow strip between a parking lot and a dam-widened pond.
Clad in a black windbreaker outside a second medical complex, Jett steered the group toward a BMP with an oxymoronic name: a “dry pond.” It consisted of a shallow bunker rimmed with shrubs. As the moniker suggests, it’s intended to be dry most of the time, gathering water only after heavy rains, he said.
Local regulations require such ponds to handle stormwater during 10-year rain events, downpours that have a 10{6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} chance of occurring in a given year. That equates to 5.6 inches of rainfall during a single event. But Jett said he routinely designs the ponds to store more water — up to 7 inches of falling rain — because climate change is triggering heavier cloudbursts.
“It literally rains differently now,” he told the group. “When we get 2 inches in a half-hour, it just blows everything out.”
Trailing along with the clipboard-carrying pack was Lisa Wool, executive director of the Nanticoke Watershed Alliance. This class — Delaware’s first — grew out of her concern that the region lacked the technical expertise to implement the new stormwater controls.
She acknowledged that the new methods involve more work and time. For example, workers may need to pull weeds with their hands instead of spraying an herbicide, which might kill desirable native plants, Wool said.
“A lot of these guys want to weed-whack, spray and then get out,” she said.
Wool directed grant money from the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control to bring the Bay Landscape Professional Program to the state. Initially, she and other organizers struggled to attract participants. So, they also used the money to fund scholarships, and the slots quickly filled up.
Rob Mason, who owns a landscape maintenance company based in West Ocean City, MD, said he hopes that the program can be a gateway to a new line of business. “There are not a lot of landscapers in this field,” he said as he leaned against his truck at the end of the Seaford tour.
He added that the program’s advice sometimes conflicts with his landscaper’s instincts to keep grass trimmed low and to avoid messiness at all costs. His new outlook: “Let it do what it’s supposed to do.”
Designing with nature
To become certified, participants must pass a final exam with a score of 75{6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} or higher. The program offers a Level I certification, which emphases maintenance practices. Level II is available to graduates of the first level and provides an advanced course in design and installation.
Classes typically take place December to March and June to September to avoid landscapers’ busy seasons in the spring and fall.
Another early realization, Ginter said, was that there was no textbook for the region’s landscape professionals looking to green up their practices. So, with funding support from the DC Department of Energy and Environment, program officials wrote an 83-page Sustainable Landscape Maintenance Manual.
During the pandemic, organizers moved some of the education online and purchased equipment to make in-person interactions safer. But the health crisis did little to stem the program’s growth. Last fall, instructors integrated the curriculum — previously only available to working adults — with a class at a high school in Portsmouth, VA, and repeated the project this spring at a school in Gloucester. Some of the program’s partners are working to develop a Spanish language version.
Kelley Oklesson leads training for the Chesapeake Landscape Professional program at Contee-Parago Park in Baltimore.
Dave Harp
Oklesson, the Hyattsville landscape architect, is certified in both levels.
She now tries to incorporate BMPs into her work even if they aren’t required by local regulations.
“Nature has had it figured out for so long,” she said. “We have so much to learn ourselves with how to design with nature.”
For information about Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional training, visit cblpro.org.
Widener Gallery will existing a a single-person exhibition of new paintings by Trinity University Studio Arts Application Director and Professor of Wonderful Arts Joseph Byrne, April 5 by way of May perhaps 6, 2022. The exhibition honors the celebration of Byrne’s retirement in June from Trinity Higher education.
Current paintings by Trinity University Studio Arts System Director and Professor of Fine Arts Joseph Byrne are featured in Widener Gallery April 5 by means of May perhaps 6, 2022. This photograph and headline picture earlier mentioned by Sarah McCoy.
A gallery speak with the artist, followed by a reception, is prepared for Tuesday, May perhaps 3, 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Widener Gallery in Austin Arts Center and is free of charge and open up to the general public.
On check out are paintings from 2020 through 2022 that are motivated by the actual physical surroundings and the cultural and geological heritage of western Ireland. Found north and west of Galway Town, the landscape of Connemara has been at the core of Byrne’s paintings for some time. This space retains a individual fascination for him that is both equally conceptual and private. His maternal grandmother was born in a compact village in close proximity to the broad Roundstone Bog, a person of Ireland’s past wild purely natural regions, which has been the focus of Byrne’s on-web site get the job done. He has traveled to the area a lot of instances and has a familial perception of position from which he paints.
Joseph Byrne Connemara #26, 2022 Oil on canvas 48″ X 48″
In this most latest series, Byrne distills the materials characteristics of this austere landscape into a sensory experience of place. His course of action utilizes layers of paint and gestural marks to reveal the complexity of the area’s geological formations. Even though his apply is grounded in very careful observation, Byrne is always navigating amongst what is out there in the world and his subjective response to it. He has stated, “I discover the additional intimate I turn out to be with a individual landscape, the much more I can invent and deviate, allowing for for that crucial go from description to interpretation.”
Byrne joined the college at Trinity School in 1999. He has directed the Studio Arts Software and chaired the High-quality Arts Department quite a few situations around his 20-as well as a long time with the school. Prior to coming to Trinity, he was professor of art at Carleton Faculty in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught for 13 decades. He acquired the two an M.F.A. and M.A. in painting from the College of Iowa, and a B.A. in art from St. John’s University, Minnesota. He has 2 times been the recipient of MacDowell Colony Fellowships, and has been an artist-in-home at the American Academy in Rome. His do the job has been exhibited nationally, and is represented by the Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis. At Trinity, he teaches all stages of painting, drawing, collage, and thesis in studio art. In addition, he introduced the submit-baccalaureate fellowship system at Trinity, now recognized as the Deborah Buck Fellowship and the Hilla Rebay Fellowship.
Joseph Byrne Connemara #27, 2022 Oil on canvas 48″ X 48″
Gallery Hrs: Monday by way of Saturday, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., shut on Sundays.
The show operates April 5 as a result of Could 6.
For additional information and facts about the exhibit, you should phone 860-297-2199 or 860-297-5232.
COVID-19 Basic safety Protocols:Members of the general public are essential to dress in a mask inside Austin Arts Centre and be geared up to demonstrate evidence of vaccination on arrival (actual physical card or picture of card). Look at for updates on Trinity’s website in this article.
Reid Collier and son Rye in the studio in the Richmond family’s backyard. (Jay Paul/For The Washington Post )
For two years, life turned inward, and living spaces responded
Reid and Heather Collier love their home. Located in Richmond’s historic Museum District, the 2,024-square-foot Victorian was a sanctuary during the pandemic. The couple strung up a hammock under the shade of the big magnolia in the backyard, where the family enjoyed picnics and their son played in the sandbox.
As the pandemic wore on, though, the Colliers didn’t particularly like their house. They couldn’t stop seeing all the things that needed attention: paint colors they didn’t like, a lack of storage in the kitchen. And with the addition of their second child and both parents working from home, they felt squeezed, at times bumping up against the confines of the house: Their active toddler kept bonking his head on the glass-top dining table.
The Colliers had to reassess their domestic situation from top to bottom. They painted, renovated a bathroom, added shelving, built a patio, updated the landscaping. And after a particularly hard collision with that dining table, they decided it was more important for their kids to have room to play than to have formal dinner. The dining room became a second living room.
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For the past two years, homes have had to work overtime, serving as schools, offices and gyms. We were confronted with the brokenness of our homes — the leaky faucet, the dated sofa, the patchy lawn — and the limits of our walls. The rush to buy real estate in the suburbs and rural areas was about gaining existential square footage as much as physical. We craved space, places for our children and our minds to wander.
Impossibly tight housing markets prompted many to stay put and make the most of their dwellings. Renovations and furniture sales soared; home design shifted to accommodate the new rhythms of people’s lives. Life turned inward, and living spaces changed too, accelerating movements toward wellness at home, nostalgia and maximalism that were already underway.
For families like the Colliers, the adjustments they’ve made have proved beneficial for their family dynamic and allowed them to settle in comfortably for the long haul. “If you put the work into your home, you really feel like being there,” Reid says.
Boundaries have been in short supply the past two years, especially in the home. Bedrooms became offices, dining rooms became schools. Family roles morphed as parent became teacher, child became colleague. Work time, school time, mealtime often bled together into one long, chaotic slog without the physical and mental demarcations that helped make sense of the day. And 9-to-5 became a thing of the past.
When gyms shuttered in 2020, many people needed somewhere to work out at home, which meant adding equipment and installing mirrors. As D.C.-based designer Zoe Feldman found, clients didn’t just want an attractive, functional area to exercise in. They wanted a separate one.
“They need to have a dedicated space— and the kids also don’t play in there and the husband doesn’t man-cave in there,” says Feldman. “You can have those boundaries within our home and with your family too. When Mommy is working out then this is Mommy’s space and Mommy’s time. It helps with the ability to spend more time in our homes.”
“Drawing the line — it’s more important now than ever,” Feldman adds. “We are asking so much of our homes, and we are living in our homes in such a harder and deeper way.”
After more than a year of working side by side at the same table, in a cramped guest room surrounded by baby gear and clothes, the Colliers decided to put a pint-size studio in the backyard. Designed by Reid, the studio added just 119 square feet but offered a new world: a quiet place for Heather, an ad agency executive producer and vice president, to conduct calls with clients and a workbench to tinker with jewelry for her vintage-fashion side hustle. It also gave Reid, a creative director, a distraction-free place to do his graphic design work.
“If you put the work into your home, you really feel like being there,” Reid Collier says.
The studio “allows us to concentrate, which we haven’t been able to do at home,” Reid says. “The act of leaving the house and walking across the yard — there’s a change that comes over you. Now I’m in a creatively dedicated zone.”
While some boundaries within the home need to be rebuilt, at least one has been eagerly erased: the line between inside and outside. Confinement has caused many to turn our homes inside out, transforming outdoor areas into entertaining and dining hubs and taking interior design cues from nature.
Memphis-based designer Carmeon Hamilton started her interior design career 14 years ago in the health-care sector, creating spaces for hospitals and nursing homes for dementia patients. She focused on stimulating memory, using color, texture and scent to activate the senses and energize the mind, and bringing the outdoors in — all techniques she has seen playing out in residential design for the past two years.
“I was dealing with people who couldn’t escape years ago,” says Hamilton, now host of HGTV’s “Reno My Rental.” “And now most of the world can’t escape, and that’s been a huge part of design.”
‘What makes the perfect outdoor space?’ Your outdoor design questions, answered.
Patio furniture sales skyrocketed in the spring of 2020 as people moved social gatherings outside; many customers still face limited selection and back-ordered listings for outdoor pieces. Noz Nozawa, a San Francisco-based designer, says her clients continue to invest in their outdoor spaces. Plopping down a beach chair and card table is no longer cutting it. Two years in, clients are prioritizing high-end upholstered seating that holds up against moisture, heat and UV rays, and people are willing to buy covers and storage to protect their outdoor cushions.
Indoors, people are opting for an outdoor feel: foliage; earthy color schemes; natural fibers; and materials like cane, jute, raffia and wood. “Being inside for two years, people are realizing how important those exterior elements are,” Hamilton says. “… That is where that boom in what I call the ‘wellness aspect’ of interior design has been — bringing the outdoors in, bringing in textures and plants and diffusers with essential oils.”
Scenic murals have made a strong comeback to create a landscape within the home. Wallpapers with natural motifs, like Josef Frank’s whimsical patterns for Svenskt Tenn, also have been rediscovered. And of course there are the houseplants.
“It was a $2 billion industry by the time the pandemic rolled around, and then houseplants became the trendiest thing,” Hamilton says. “… It’s important to have things alive in your space. Things that have been trendy over the past two years have been good for people.”
For the better part of a decade, the Danish concept of “hygge” (meaning “cozy”) has been popular in the design world, as people sought to imbue their spaces with not just a look, but a feeling of intimacy. During the pandemic, hygge has taken on a new, all-encompassing dimension. Feldman has been transforming family rooms, studies and dens into intimate refuges.
“We are doing a lot of textured walls, almost like having people feel like their room feels like a warm sweater or a hug. People are really liking cozy right now,” she says. “The fire is going and it’s very tonal and textural. There’s tons of soft fabrics like sheepskin, chenille, mohair and velvets.”
Color schemes, many nature-inspired, are moving to the warm end of the spectrum, too — russet and oxblood, hunter greens and moss tones, navy hues, earthy oranges and curry yellows, along with grays with green undertones.
Instead of starting with a design aesthetic or inspiration piece, Feldman and her clients are using feelings as a launching point. “Really anything that makes you feel really, really warm, put your feet up and read a book, have a big glass of red wine, and put on some music,” she says. “And that’s also the hard part of it. We aren’t relaxed — politically and environmentally. The home needs to feel like a safe space and reprieve.”
“The home needs to feel like a safe space and reprieve,” says designer Zoe Feldman.
Nozawa says clients during the pandemic have come to her less for resale-friendly designs and more for highly personalized looks that they can enjoy for the long haul. “They want their homes to tell their stories and be surrounded by something that means something to them,” she said. “That’s happening a lot earlier in the design process.”
In her past work designing for memory care patients, Hamilton incorporated pieces to reflect those individuals: culturally important objects, family heirlooms, travel mementos. “That personal connection with people is important to help people feel grounded and well in their own space,” she says.
“It’s more about feeling great in your home now than it was before.”
The pre-pandemic era was dominated by all-white interiors and minimalist straight lines. “Everything was white. It was sterile and boring,” Hamilton says. “And I think once people had to live in it during the pandemic they were like, ‘This isn’t the most exciting thing to be surrounded by,’ and that’s when the resurgence of color came back.”
The tedium of the pandemic might be behind a shift toward pieces from the postmodern era. Think psychedelic murals, abstract art, asymmetry and curves. “There’s a boldness and confidence to 1980s and ’90s furniture and art that’s just very appealing during these times of questioning and uncertainty — and also as we’ve continued to emerge from the long period of polite aesthetic neutrality that dominated the design scene,” says Anthony Barzilay Freund, editorial director and director of fine art for 1stDibs, an online marketplace for high-end home furnishings and fashion.
The retailer reports that its top sellers include furnishings by Venini, Karl Springer, Mazzega Murano, Ligne Roset and Directional. And in the art sector, pop art and street art by greats like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney have been popular.
As buyers grow tired of the “Mad Men” aesthetic and millennials look to echo the surroundings they grew up with, they are turning their attention to recent history. “It makes sense that we’re marching into the brash ’80s and ’90s,” Freund says. “Those are decades that are only now distant enough for us to feel nostalgic about them.”
As the pandemic moves to endemic, those of us who have made our dwellings more comfortable may have a newfound appreciation for the steadfastness of our homes — the fortresses we have relied on during this trying time.
“I think people want to escape a lot less now that we have had two years to make changes,” Hamilton says. “People are thinking home is an okay place to be. I don’t have to leave my space to feel connected to something or myself.”
While it feels good to leave, we also now have the pleasure of returning, of opening the door and encountering the sweet familiarity of home. Knowing what we have endured within those walls, we can appreciate it more than ever.
“No matter how sick you get of anything,” Nozawa says, “you have to come home.”
Landscapes are key to understanding our body-minds and by extension our Twin Peaks. The show employs familiar landforms that deeply resonate with our collective unconscious, and whose “coordinates” direct important events in the series. For example, clues lead Cooper to Owl Cave—a chamber protecting “coordinates” to a circular pit surrounded by trees deep in the heart of Glastonbury Grove. Other coordinates lead to another pit marked by a single sycamore tree—an extraction point to the Fireman’s Fortress. Others lead to a deadly boulder—a target for the arrow of an entire plotline.
It turns out archetypal and real-life doppelgängers of these landforms direct the events of major religions as well. Let’s spelunk into each one.
Caves
Caves, with their shadowy twilight zones, are a great place to start any mythic journey as they are womb-like and occupy a very, very, very special place in the American religious imagination. Jesus was born in a cave and resurrected in one; Elijah spoke to his creator outside a cave on Mount Carmel; St. Francis of Assisi meditated naked in Eremo della Carceri; Saint John received his epic dream vision in the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos Island; Muhammed met his creator inside the Cave of Hira; Joseph Smith received the plates that would become the Book of Mormon near the Cave of Chomora, and then hid them there, “along with other sacred treasures” like the Sword of Laban; Bodhidharma, after igniting Zen Buddhism and all martial arts at Shaolin Temple, meditated inside a nearby cave for so long (nine years) that his arms and legs fell off and his eyes dried out! Commemorative eyeless dolls in Japan called Daruma look like black, white, and red eggs. It’s customary to color in one of the empty eyes as a form of good luck magic, and then burn the doll every new year.
Mouth to Bodhidharma Cave near Shaolin Temple.
People pilgrimage to Bodhidharma’s cave and to the others. We’d go to Owl Cave if we could! Lynch/Frost filmed some of the Owl Cave scenes at Bronson Cave in Los Angeles, itself a movie star of sorts, and they also used sets—the cave lifted up out of the “real” and into the abstract.
COOPER: Where is the symbol?
HAWK: This way.
Here are some still shots from Steven Miller’s deep dive into Owl Cave. Notice the pre-staging of Phillip Jefferies’s scene in Season 3 Part 17: a ring of light, 8, owl symbol, and a “map” of Twin Peaks.
An owl leaves Owl Cave at the end of On The Wings Of Love.
There are a lot of fictional and true horror stories about getting trapped in caves, and a whole genre called “subterranean fiction” that spans Dante’s Divine Comedy (where Hell is a system of caves) to The Three-Body Problem, Broken Earth Trilogy, LOTR, The Matrix, The 100, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts,American Horror Story: Apocalypse, Lost, and so on. As we now move into homes designed with “Zoom Rooms,” we have to wonder if our technology is preparing us for this epochal transition underground already. The 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now is going to be kept in a cave. This collection of “underground wonders” are examples of possible locations.
Aronofsky’s film mother!features a secret cave and a classic “woman in trouble” scenario. At one point, the “mother” fingers a red stain on her floor that opens into a hidden cave where she finds her secret power: fire.
Caves also embody what feminist Elaine Showalter (1992)calls the “female wild zone.” It’s a place where women can harness and unleash their power. Considering the etymologies of “cunt”—a rabbit hole, a wedge, a Hindu goddess?—of course a “cave” protects a coded map to the mythical “Black Lodge.”
Perhaps all openings are caves are vaginas are sources of knowledge. Performance artist Carolee Schneeman famously explored these links in Interior Scroll (1975), versions of which took place inside actual caves. She speaks of a “translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model.” Bjork likes to sing in caves.
Caves within caves, openings within openings. Fire and oil are somehow involved. Micheal Garfield:
…my eyes the fire projecting shadows of imagination on the cave walls of my unborn and undying consciousness.
Grottoes
In any case, within art history, caves are where the strange is both hidden and spotlighted. There is a genre of oil painting, Grotto painting, that features chiaroscuro dramas in caves, where the mouth acts as a spotlight and the cave walls are curtains. What is staged often reflects a queerer or more alien—literally “grotesque” which derives from grotto and from Emperor Nero’s cavernous 16th-century palace, Domus Aurea, decorated with frescos representing bizarre motifs inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses—harpies, alien plants, women transforming into architecture, and more!
These decorative patterns—grotesques—are part of the history of surrealism, horror, fantasy, and are sacred vocabulary: wide-mouthed masks and puking gargoyles are used to decorate churches. Tangentially, Mikhail Bakhtin calls the mouth specifically a main feature of the grotesque (see The Monster in the Garden: the Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design, 2016). Philip Thomson in The Grotesque: The Critical Idiom, points out aspects of “grotto-art” that we can spot in Twin Peaks: disharmony, abnormality, unresolved conflicts (“the payoff is that there is no payoff“), comedy, extremeness, the terrifying, the supernatural, and the disgusting. Like actual grottoes, grotesques and Twin Peaks are “unstable,” they could collapse at any second, and they are always reflecting something in the middle of a transformation. Susan Bowers, describing grotesques, sounds like she is describing Twin Peaks:
It is a flamboyant art form, brimming over with exaggeration, hyperbole, and excess, perhaps because exaggerated forms with exaggerated emotions are more symbolic and conducive to evoking the numinous, the uncanny, or the horrible.
The show isn’t just a “moving painting,” it’s a moving grotesque! Bowers: “The grotesque is a marvelous hybrid: it celebrates the body, but it also expresses psychic currents underneath the surface of the unconscious.” Twin Peaks and grotesques connect through another concept, the carnival. Nihat Can Kantarcit specifically compares HBO’s Carnivàle to Twin Peaks as they’re both about a settler town constructed as “a sacred site of the American repressed.” Quoting Bakhtin:
Filled with the spirit of carnival, the grotesque liberates the world from all that is dark and terrifying (…) All that was frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities.
Grottoes also refer to fake caves built for gardens and parks to evoke the spiritual. They are symbolic but also merely aesthetic: dark places contain deeper colors. Junichiro Tanizaki in his famous essay In Praise of Shadows even argues that shadows are the foundation of a human house: “In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.” Check out this kickass episode of Weird Studies Podcast about Tanizaki.
The Brain on Caves
A cave’s darkness, the “dark zone,” does things to us. Caves create conditions like sensory deprivation and Ganzfeld effects (akin to a James Turell light installation) that force the brain to deviate from its normal waking state. According to historian Yulia Ustinova, this is why, in ancient Greece, entering caves was a requirement for visionary or prophecy-giving experiences. I’m thinking of that part of Aronofsky’s film Noah, where Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) lives in a cave, and Noah (Russel Crow) sees it in a dream and travels there to receive psychoactive tea that helps him envision the ark.
Apparently, after just a few days of total darkness, the human brain produces more DMT, the endogenous “spirit molecule” partially responsible for dreams and mystical experiences. More, studies using eye-tracking glasses indicate that eye-movement patterns during darkness resemble those during activities involving abstract and divergent thinking. Darkness seems to provoke creativity. Studies also suggest even just brief periods of darkness cause the brain to retrieve ambient magical consciousness. Professor Holley Moyes who studies the archaeology of religion thinks darkness not only makes us hallucinate, it promotes “magical thinking.” In her 2012 study, volunteers sitting in a dark room were more likely to answer questions in a “supernatural” way, while people sitting in a well-lit room answered the same questions more rationally—questions like: If you wake up and smell the pipe smoke of your dead grandfather, what is your first explanation? Check out Moyes’s TED talk.
It’s the darkness, but it could also be toxic fumes that alter our minds in caves. Some scholars think poisonous cave gasses were responsible for Greek histories and myths. It was probably ethylene, a gas that “produces feelings of aloof euphoria” (see For Delphic Oracle, Fumes and Visions). Ethylene plus a spike in DMT plus sensory deprivation effects? Given our four-dimensional selves, this all could have helped people foresee a future. Nevertheless, even when completely sober:
We do not behold a passive, inert scene but are immersed in a pulsing space, in the currents and energies of a world-in-formation, even in the darkness, and the light or lack of it is entwined with our sensing bodies, blurring distinctions between outside and inside. – Tim Edensor
Caves are important destinations for enlightened revelation, and if you don’t live near one, you can still “retreat” by closing yourself up in a dark room or closet, as we see in the Tibetan practice of a dark retreat. You can recreate some of the conditions of a cave, however, the dangers that heighten the body’s awareness cannot be replicated in a dark closet.
Leonardo’s Cave
As drug-laced sacred destinations, caves help information from the margins of consciousness get felt by the mind and transformed into art. Leonardo Di Vinci famously had a powerful experience with a cave as a young man. He stumbled upon one in the forest that caused him to feel two contrary emotions at once, fear and desire, “ — fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.” He went in, and after that episode recorded in his diary, Leonardo started drawing helicopters, tanks, and advanced geometry. Ancient Aliens wonders if inside that cave Leonardo was beamed visions from elsewhere. Maybe he fell into a portal to the future, or to his own 4D “long self.” Around this time, he also went missing for two years! Alien abduction? Maybe, or maybe he was just laying low after being charged with sodomy—I think he was 24—a traumatic event he never got over. Leonardo remained celibate for the rest of his life.
What else do caves represent?
It’s not the world in which we live our daily lives, but the unseen, underground world where people live out their fantasies that has power. Forbidden desires and fantasies… ~ Virgil Ortiz
In Episode 25, the owl seen leaving the cave is different from the one who attacks Andy and the others. Did Andy release someone? I have a theory: maybe ancient people caught the owl/alien and walled it up in the cave with a map to the lodge so that, “In case owl is released, go here.” Or maybe whoever was trapped in there was good, which is why Andy was included as one of the chosen people.
I wonder if the large owl released from the cave is symbolic of another story. The nuclear radiation symbol found on Briggs’s neck that helps lead Cooper to the cave looks like a ceiling fan. Bluefrank over at the Twin Peaks Gazette thinks it’s the sigil for Chronozon, a “guardian” part of the Tree of Life (which is shaped like an 8). Intuition noticed that the entire symbol is a version of the Mystic Tetrad.
White Tail Falls
Eliade: “The discovery or projection of a fixed point—the center—is equivalent to the creation of the world.”
Twin Peaks is marked on the inside by Owl Cave and on the outside by the breathtaking White Tail Falls, which is a real place called Snoqualmie Falls, one of the tallest and most powerful waterfalls in the now-USA. Comparable to Niagara Falls (it’s actually taller than Niagara), some call it a Garden of Eden because it’s where, in the Snoqualmie myth-histories, the first humans emerged.
Can you imagine being able to visit the place where your people first emerged or landed? There is a pagan emergence place in Caesarea Philippi known as The Gates of the Netherworld, but Eden is lost to Christians. It’s “hidden,” but they couldn’t return there anyway because of the two angelic monsters guarding the entrance with their spinning swords of fire. Who are those guys? I like to think this image of a hidden garden and spinning gates of fire is a metaphor for the anaerobic bacterial now living in our guts—our cousins forced down into the muck by the fiery sword of the sun. Maybe, when oxygen began to fill the atmosphere, the ones who could “eat” and metabolize it were thrown out of “the garden,” destined to live above ground. Eden, our evolutionary birthplace, is now carried inside our bodies, as the ocean is carried inside of animal eggs.
Anyway, this Garden of Eden, Snoqualmie Falls, is now sacred for a second set of reasons. It’s one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Peakers. Interestingly the falls are never really addressed in the show, which focuses instead on building a mythology around Owl Cave. I wonder if this was a way to respect the symbolic power of the actual site.
When you live next to your culture’s origin place, you get to visit there on class field trips and special occasions. Japanese people mark the top of Takachiho mountain on Kyushu their origin place, and the last time I was there I was surrounded by schoolchildren playing and taking pictures. Inversely, the Hopi and other Southwest tribes believe they emerged from the bottom of The Grand Canyon, specifically from a “sipapu” near the otherworldly blue waters of the Little Colorado. Rainbow Falls is the emergence place for the Zuni, Havasu Falls for the Havasupai. These sites are forbidden to outsiders, and backpackers who seek them out report strange accidents. Related, Sipapu is the name of the oldest Ski Resort in Northern New Mexico, opened by a white settler named Lloyd Bolander, “one of the last true pioneers.” Of course he named his hotel after a sacred Native American site.
Pits
Since pits are important landmarks in the show, let’s consider the concept of a sipapu. It’s a circular hole that marks “a portal between worlds.” What’s that? Frank Waters in The Book of the Hopi recalls stories about the first humans being led through a series of “Cave Worlds” before exiting into our world through the sipapu. Apparently, when we stepped outside of the pit, we morphed from lizard-like beings into human forms. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and according to Larry Torres, the word sipapu in Uto-Aztecan refers to “the womb of the Earth.”
Clay also comes from pits by the river, and archaeologists like Ian Hodder talk about a near-universal “Age of Clay,” (aka the Neolithic) when humans lived in clay houses and through clay vessels. There are also a ton of humans-from-clay creation stories, like the Judeo-Christian one, where “Adam” is Hebrew for dirt.
Waterfalls and caves make pits, but pits are also dug. In northern New Mexico, there is a church, El Santuario de Chimayo, one of the most-visited holy sites in the US, which enshrines a circular pit famous for its “miracle dirt.” Like many religious art installations, the temple was built around the sacred place, which, of course, predates human settlement in that area. But in this case, it’s not the specific dirt so much as the spot that “charges” the dirt. According to Olsen Brad, the church replaces the dirt from the nearby hillsides every day, but as Belden Lane puts it, far from being a repudiation of the sacredness of the site, this transfer of dirt is proof of how the sacred extends itself into the profane (2001: 62).
Believers speak of a legendary light emanating from deep in the ground at Chemeyo, and how Bernardo Abeyta on Good Friday in 1810 dug into the light and miraculously found The Black Christ of Esquipulas. The site today, according to Lane, “is abuzz with the anguish of stored lament,” an atmosphere he can only compare to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
The setup at El Santuario de Chimayo reminds me of art collective Postcommodity’s 2012 installation Do You Remember When, where they opened up a square pit of dirt in the middle of the gallery floor to create a sipapu.
The circular pit at Chimayo also resembles the pit enshrined in Bethlehem marking the exact site where Jesus was born.
Grotto of the Nativity, inside the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine. In the myth-histories, this star marks the place where Jesus was born. See also the cave-like “Door of Humility” in Bethlehem.
A simulated sipapu is created in the bottom of a pueblo house or kiva directly across from the fire pit. There are also two pits in Twin Peaks, one surrounded by 12 sycamore trees, and the other marked by just one, perhaps the legendary 13th Sycamore that Cooper was, and was not, warned about by the Fireman. One pit is black and the other is gold.
Lastly, sacred pits famously configure the lives of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea. This tribe worships the oil that comes out of a pit in the forest. They believe the oil flows under the landscape itself in “the realm of the spirit world.” F.J.P. Poole (1986) quotes the tribe’s leader: “The oil is our blood, our semen, our bone, our heritage from our ancestors…our life.” This association makes the entire forest a realm of immense ritual and spiritual importance. A ten-year initiation is required before anyone can even set foot near the sacred pit.
Pits can be scary and are associated with quicksand, swamps, tar pits, and black goo. They can also refer to people and situations. In their episode on Part 14, Diane podcast remarks on how “Sarah feels like a pit,” and her face opens up like a dark pit or cave.
Back to the Falls
Slavoj Zizek famously marked Lynch’s universe the “ridiculous sublime,” and Allister MacTaggart, in Lynchian Landscapes and the Legacy of the American Sublime, points out that Lynch grew up in and around the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and this might explain the show’s “Emersonian transcendentalism.”
Waterfalls are classic symbols for the sublime, maybe also for America. Abraham Lincoln visited Niagara Falls in 1848 and brilliantly described it through geological, psychological, and philosophical perspectives. He said, for example, that “all the water constantly pouring down is supplied by an equal amount constantly lifted up by the sun.” Then Lincoln describes a kind of all-American myth-time that the waterfall opened up inside of him:
But still there is more. It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara, as ours do now… fresh today as ten thousand years ago.
“Giants.” In evolutionary anthropology, there is a theory that waterfalls (like boulders, caves, and pits) are a key to understanding the origin of religion. Jane Goodall recorded chimpanzees “dancing with excitement” around waterfalls, and she remarks how they will sit in the water at the base and stare up at them as if in a state of aesthetic appreciation. This could be due to the water’s sublime and symbolic power (water is life), but it could also be due to the trippy aftereffects that staring at the constantly moving water has on the brain. The “waterfall illusion” is when we hallucinate movement when we look at something stationary after staring at something moving in one direction for some time. This can also mess with our sense of time.
Waterfalls also symbolize orgasms, and according to philosopher Sara Heinamaa, they “frame crucial romantic encounters in several popular movies,” like The Lion King and Avatar. “They allude to sexual climax, which thus appears as an explosive or overflowing event.” Maybe on some level, the opening credits of Twin Peaks: The Return give us subliminal orgasms: music swells, water gushes, curtains billow, world spins. Similarly, waterfalls may represent vomiting and other cathartic expulsions.
Waterfalls have been used to explain a property of black holes. Bill Unruh theorizes that light crossing the horizon of a black hole is like sound passing over the edge of a supersonic waterfall. It cannot escape. “The analogy turned out to be more accurate than Unruh initially thought. Eight years later, in 1980, he realized that the equations of motion for sound in the waterfall analogy were identical to those describing light at the horizon of a black hole.”
Lastly, we should note that New Zealand just recently granted The Whanganui River the status of a legal person with rights and responsibilities. Alas, waterfalls and other rivers are people, too. In Getting Dirty, Anishinaabe scholar Melissa Nelson points out that there is an entire genre of Indigenous oral stories from the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere about intimate relationships between humans and other-than-human entities like logs, rivers, stars, even winds. People form relationships with geological formations as well, especially irregular stone outcroppings in the landscape.
Like waterfalls, caves, and pits, boulders are a big deal in our collective unconscious. Archaeologist Christopher Tilley (2004) argues that our prehistoric identities were created predominantly near and by boulders in the landscape. Irregular stone outcroppings were landmarks and social sites — pegs and attractors within our cognitive maps of the world. Viewing boulders was an important process by which we could tap into ancestral powers at specific locations, and it helped us anchor identity in those powers and locations (see Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places about Apache boulders that tell stories and keep people connected to their ancestral languages and morality). More, researchers in the field of spatial psychology propose Prospect-Refuge theory (Appleton, 1975; Dosen and Ostwald, 2016) suggesting humans evolved to seek out higher and safer vantage points. Alas, Richard’s path up to that boulder was laid down by millions of years of hunter-gatherer instinct.
Humans also, in theory, seek out landscapes with physical characteristics that support certain psychological dimensions.
Erratics
Boulders become vantage points, landmarks, sites for cultural transmission, art, and, in Twin Peaks, they become a site for killing doppelgangers and murdering sons. This resonates with the Biblical “Binding of Isaac,” where Abraham takes his son to die atop a large stone on Mount Moriah.
This boulder looks out of place, an erratic, glacially transported here and thus probably the center of a local legend. Indigenous stories abound of boulders that were once giants, monsters, gods, even human people that turned into stone and may one day turn back, such as the Lakota Standing Rock, the Paiute Stone Mother, and the Navajo Shiprock. Celtic landscapes are likewise filled with magical boulders, like Lia Fáil, a coronation stone that was said to roar or shriek when a true king sits upon it. Another legend says it roars only when a false king sits on it. Is this what happened to Richard? There is also the great Cat Stone aka Stone of Divisions near Ireland’s geological center, on the Hill of Uisneach, that marks where the goddess Éire (Ireland’s namesake) is said to be buried.
Large stones are found in the center of all major religions. Interestingly, the Abrahamic God is called a “rock” many times in the Bible. The Black Stone, Hajal al Aswad, is enshrined at the Cube or Kaaba in Mecca. In the myth, this meteorite was dropped into Eden as the first altar. There is also the Christian “Stone of Anointing,” Japanese Iwakura or Ishigami stone gods—the Sessho-seki, a stone said to kill anyone who comes into contact with it, recently made news by cracking open on March 5th, 2022; the Stone of Scone, The Blarney Stone, Excalibur’s stone, and more. No doubt a stone’s silence, indifference, and durability make it a perfect receptacle for our dreams of transcendence.
Boulders are mini-mountains, and in settler histories of what we now call the US, the most famous one is Plymouth Rock, where the original Pilgrims first landed. Originally, this boulder was the same size as the one we see in Twin Peaks, but like the body of a saint, fragments were carved off, venerated and distributed far and wide. “Its very dust is shared as a relic,” says Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Over the course of 400 years, it went from a 200-ton boulder to a five-by-six-foot rounded fragment which is now enshrined in what looks like a Roman temple in Massachusetts. Indigenous American activists sometimes bury Plymouth Rock, as it is also “a monument to murder, slavery, theft, racism and oppression.”
Steven Miller found the location of the boulder from Part 16, what he calls “False Coordinates Rock”—it’s in Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, California, “the largest ranch inside the Los Angeles Studio Zone.” It turns out the boulder, like the cave, is a movie star!
Conclusion
There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. – Beldan Lane
The interior landscape is influenced by the exterior. Twin Peaks encourages us to overflow like a waterfall, go spelunking in our souls, feel like a pit, and disintegrate atop an ancient boulder. It employs familiar landscapes that resonate deeply with our bodies and minds.
Like many of us, I want to know to what extent Twin Peaks is linked to our religious ideas and narratives of place in the “real” world. How does Twin Peaks shape our lived and imagined landscapes? “The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to see.” Conversely, how do our lived landscapes shape our experience of Twin Peaks? We can glean insights from Landscape Studies.
The history of the concept of landscape is tied to painting, photography, phenomenology, the study of visual perception, geography, and religion. When approaching landscapes of the sacred, theologian Beldan Lane thinks we should move away from the comfortable “cognitivism” of people “in” space, and towards a “non-dualistic phenomenology that recovers the wholeness and nonduality of place.” He says,
A sacred place is not simply a unique site magically “possessed” by chthonic forces. Nor is it a topographical wax nose that can be culturally twisted into anything one makes of it. A difficulty with both approaches is that the perceiver largely ignores the actual particularities of the place itself. It becomes a blank slate on which divine or human meanings are arbitrarily inscribed — by means of luminous revelation on the one hand or cultural construction on the other.
I believe Twin Peaks encourages us to consider a more non-dual “enactive approach to cognition,” where we can transcend the inside-outside, subject-object split. We can see through the dream of an autonomous, disembodied soul or witnessing consciousness “just aware” of everything, and feel how perception is really a cooperative, interactive process—a handshake between the organism and its environment.
Subject and site inter-act, so much so that different characters construct different worlds through their embodied interactions with it. Likewise, living lodge spaces and the actual physical locations engage with each other, “not as independent entities per se by as agents within a material matrix of becoming” (Vasquez 315). As Tim Ingold puts it, “Organism plus environment should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality.”
A human’s experience and an owl’s experience of the same cave will be very different. Nicole Boivin talks about a water bug “enacting” the water not as a place to swim, but as a place to walk, thus pointing out how engagement with the environment even constructs its material properties to a degree. For those of us who spend a lot of time “in” Twin Peaks, we may want to pay attention to this intimate reciprocity.
We live in the storied place as it lives inside us. Religions like Twin Peaks are external and internal landscapes, processess, or what Thomas Tweed calls sacrospaces: they move and impel us to move. Maybe we should approach Twin Peaks not as a story but as an ecological, corporeal, and semiotic-cognitive-numinous process—aka a sacred landscape, a religion. Tweed (2006: 79): “As spatial practices, religions are active verbs linked with unsubstantial nouns by bridging prepositions: from, with, in between, through, and most important, across. Religions designate where we are from, whom we are with, and prescribe how we move across.”
