HuffingtonPost.com
Peter Clothier
Posted January 28, 2009
It is not often, these days, that I walk into an exhibition space and feel those familiar symptoms–the heart beating harder, faster, the head spinning with awe, the blood running through the veins–by which I recognize that I’m in the presence of genius. And I don’t mean just that intellectual brilliance we too often associate with the word in its casual use, but something closer to its profounder meaning, a transcendent connection between humanity and what I can only describe with the word “spirit.” It’s an expression of greatness, of the awesome potential of the imagination, of the boundless, passionate creativity that can spring from a single, singular human mind.
It’s this complex of feelings that overwhelmed me as I stepped across the threshold and into that space of the Santa Monica Museum of Art that is now devoted to the work of the Ethiopian artist Elias Simé, in a show called “Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart,” co-curated by the multi-disciplinary arts impresario Peter Sellars and the noted Ethiopian curator and anthropologist Meskerem Assegued. If I can help you step into that space yourself, you’ll be able to understand what I mean by “boundless creativity…”
Come with me, then. Your eye will likely be attracted, first, by the hundreds of goatskins, stuffed with straw and decorated with bright, totemic markings, laid out on the floor and arranged in groups that suggest love in all of its myriad forms, whether intimate, sexual even, between two beings, or family love, parents with children, or community groupings whose bond is love of a different, more inclusive kind. It will move on, then, to an arrangement of regal thrones at the center of the gallery floor, each constructed of sensuously carved wood, animal horns, skins and shells, their presence evoking the ritual of kingship, the authority of the seated ruler.
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