As time went by and the collecting continued, a method to the madness emerged. These pebbles were being slowly relocated to the entrance pathway. They were harvested for a growing art-installation that decodes the anomalous grey of Shofuso's existing gravel into a surprising spectrum. The gray contains hidden colors and vitality. The finished piece, called Shades of Truth, is 24'x1.5', the result of roughly 50 hours of patient and painstaking selection, one pebble at a time. The piece and its process are a testament to the selective nature of historical interpretation, which is the foremost function of Shofuso as a beacon of Japanese culture. Small granules of chromatic "truth" - hard and reliable just as we consider "fact" to be - are arranged by deliberate selection into a symmetrical gradation to express the pointillistic / impressionistic nature of history..... that when we are close it is about details, and when we are distant it is about context/perspective. One that draws those details into an imperfect summary vision (imperfect because no matter how "well arranged," a summary stands in neglect of specificity).
Before any of these concepts arose, my intention was to explore Shofuso's identity as a host for culture through a prism of color. With Shades of Truth, I addressed the issue by using Shofuso's own materials as my medium. All the pebbles used are ones that exist at Shofuso, ones that have collected the history of weather, time, human traffic, etc over many years. Therefore it is site specific in the purest sense. The colors that emerged from what was ostensibly gray is astounding. Pinks, burgundy, beige, yellow, white, blue, black, grey, and others. I wanted first to surprise visitors with this hidden reality, but its conceptual impact revealed itself through the meticulousness and tactility of the process.The gravel will slowly rearrange with the trampling of feet and the spectrum of colors will eventually even back out into a greyish mosaic as history continues to accumulate and summarize.
