Reflection Tapestries
Description: Hunter S. Thompson quote: Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.
Description: The skull is one of the most universally recognized symbols in existence. From the Jolly Roger to tombstones and hazard labels, it’s an easy way to represent the concepts of danger and death. Medieval Europe had an entire genre for cranial imagery: memento mori (Latin for “remember that you die”). These artworks — The DanseMacabre skeletons, the vanitas still lifes — were meant to remind the viewers of their mortality. Centuries passed, trends came and went, but the memento mori stayed alive. In the late 19th century, Charles Allan Gilbert created a landmark visual pun titled All is Vanity. Look at the illustration, and you see a skull. Blink, and it transforms into a young woman admiring herself in a vanity.
Description: The loneliness of the moon, which gazes at its reflection forever, mysterious and misunderstood. The depths of the sea and the heights of the sky are too complex and inaccessible to fussy creatures. The movement of the planets and cosmic music, the rising of the moon and sun—these are majestic concepts and spectacles, free and rarely observed, although they are the most beautiful. Perhaps because many love to sleep, and they dream of work, quarrels and copulations with their own kind, earnings, beautiful clothes and bodies, a new car and rivalry—all this vanity, akin to the movement of worms in a garbage dump.
