Subject to Change without Notice - 2004

HEGEMONY Hegemony is inspired by the megalithic stone circles of prehistoric Avebury in the U.K. Avebury dwarfs the more familiar Stonehenge and is perhaps the most impressive prehistoric stone circle anywhere in the world. The building of Avebury in 2600 B.C. was a Herculean task. Hauling six meter high 50 ton stones for a mile or more and then levering them into the vertical involved respectable engineering skills. Avebury was architecture, unifying and coherent, establishing a domain for man, creating a space of order and permanence in a life threatened constantly by the domination of the appalling forces and chaos of nature. Today those same skills, never more formidable, may well be pushing the natural balance beyond its capacity to sustain life as we know it. In Hegemony we see the mark of this astonishing ingenuity on a massive, fractured, stone-like form. An ingenuity that has come to dominate what the poet Wallace Stevens has described as our “Earth of physical hugeness and rough enormity, ... a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes and barrens and wilds... that dwarfs and terrifies and crushes.” Hegemony is a monument. To the power of man to direct and manipulate? Or to traces of that manipulation, the fossil remains of a past dominion? It is a monument to an age, at a time when the opportunity to adapt–––to modify the demands on our finite world–––may unwittingly slip beyond our control, spurring the resurgent forces of a ruthless natural economy. In the most positive sense it is an appeal for balance, a pause to acknowledge that the Earth of Wallace Stevens is very much present today and can be every bit as threatening as it was 5000 years ago. Our capacity to invent is virtually without limit, but are there the will and the imagination to strike the necessary balance?

Ray Meeker Pondicherry August, 2004