<( * )( * )>

Moving down the path over the moat, I notice a theme, objects without purpose, or objects repurposed. Is an object without a purpose just one whose purpose has become more nuanced and symbiotic, less about capital and economy and more about that passing of time, movement of visible and invisible substances, pressures exerted from unintended sources, where one looks for meaning in a life?

Look at this metal box that was maybe for an outlet once, and it has a name etched in the top, “SUPRA-S”. What did “SUPRA-S” once hold? Now it holds a little yin-yang sticker with a rip through its middle. A theme at Brenke’s Fish Ladder is fractions and division. The yin-yang is a fraction, male and female, and the rip divides it again signifying another cosmological potential, what emerges in a new continuum, silver and reflective.

Lower still, there are two white shapes, hieroglpyhs. I am lowering into Dante’s inferno, but who is my guide? I look outside myself for signs. The first shape I see looks like a Devil with horns. Horns represent power and a global connectedness–horns were traded with metals along Phoenician seafaring routes reaching to Scandanavia and the Baltic Sea. Horns represent new regimes, political and religious. And the quintessential warrior.

When a trade takes place, each world takes a loss but there is also a gain. Next to the horned figure is a simpler geometric shape, two joined rectangles, one large one small, perhaps a judge’s mallet, a hammer, or is this just the Devil’s shape abstracted? One reduced to another, images traded across a route, the ache of needing and wanting what’s faraway, then getting it: the judge’s mallet hits the table and the trade is complete.

But what about Mario at the very bottom, with googly eyes running joyfully toward the next mission, scarf flowing behind him, star on his hat, digit-less hands? What pleasures does he seek, jumping up to get more life, but why, what does he desire but constant motion and adventure, when does he stop to reflect? Is it Mario who, when no one’s looking, draws his cute, bubbly man-parts on the doors of Brenke’s Fish Ladder? To feel complete is that what’s necessary, a vulgar outlet, a Mario-style variation on Georgia O’keefe?