Read Catalog - Charles Simonds

Circles and Towers Growing
This series traces a possible and fairly comprehensive evolution
of the Little People's world and their usc of it through ritual
and architecture.
Commentaries
By John Hallmark Neff
Number 1 (pl. 32)
This is the beginning-that is, that point in the landscape's
evolution that the artist has chosen to show us first. We infer
what has gone before from what remains. There are few topographical
features, no presence of life forms. The surface is
slightly rough and the crust is broken by irregular networks of
cracks, some fine, others coarse and deep. The pattern is not that
of a window, smashed but still intact, with the lines radiating
from the point of impact. Rather, the lines are peculiar to a
horizontal surface drying at different rates according to the
depth of the water, the intensity of the heat, and the malleability
of the earth. The image is of a land once submerged, now
recently revealed, a tabula raso upon which the landscape can
begin to assert itself.
We are unsure of the age of this first frame of Simonds's landscape.
There are no fossils, no reptilian tracks-it could be the
summer mud of a housing tract in Illinois. Yet we know it is
meant to be old, the water only just absorbed and evaporated,
leaving the earth dry, anticipating change.1
Number 2 (pl. 33)
If the first landscape results from the surface action of sun,
wind, and water upon the land, the second seems to represent a
moment when forces from deep within the earth surge to the
surface, erupting in shallow elliptical domes above the crust.
The hypogene swellings are irregular in size and shape but
share a diagonal orientation across the fundamental square.
Some of the rounded hills are topped with smaller mounds or
fissures; some are open, connectives to the interior heat; others
are already smooth and cooling. Now visually differentiatedthe
basis for fixed points, then axes and orientation-the landscape
becomes a specific place: here, not there.2
Number 3 (pl. 34)
The third landscape shows for the first time signs of habitation.
Two pathways beginning near opposite corners (but not precisely
at the edges) meander over the earth's contours, curving
around the shallow domes. One path appears to terminate at a
pole, taller than the others that form a loose circle around one
of the swelling mounds. The poles mark areas of ritual activity.
Since Number 2, the swellings have been further accentuated
by small rings, fissures, and nipplelike buds. Others have been
capped with colored stones. Reddish-orange sand in the concavities
or valleys further differentiates this half from the lessevolved
yellow section where the water has receded further to
a single arid quadrant.
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