Soldered brass, 11 x 17 x 13, 2008.
The Canon is a camera that answers to four words: Canon, cannon, canyon and Kwanon. The sculpture gives each its own part.
The camera and the cannon share a verb. Both are aimed, loaded and fired. The lens barrel is stepped and hollow like a bore, and it points at whoever stands in front of the piece. A domed fitting on top sits where a shutter release would be.
The canyon is the same barrel read as landscape. The stepped rings descend into the dark like strata in a gorge wall, and a rough mass of rock rises beside the lens. A face shows in profile in that rock, so the cliff is occupied. Rock faces are also the old Chinese way of seeing a mountain as a being.
Kwanon is the Japanese reading of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, and it’s the name Canon the company was first built on. Her name means the one who perceives the sounds of the world. The sculpture puts her in the rock beside the lens, where Guanyin is conventionally enthroned on her mountain. The flared horn at the rear of the camera is an ear trumpet. A device for seeing is fitted with an organ for hearing, which is the faculty her name assigns her.
The fourth sense gives the first three a different cast. A canon is the standard against which bodies are measured, and Polykleitos wrote the original. The Greek key band engraved around the lens and the scallop shell fanned out at the back are properties of that tradition. A camera selects what it keeps and a cannon destroys what it hits. The bodhisattva hears everything and refuses no one, and the whole piece stands between those two kinds of attention.
