Altar to Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun

To the Mexican people, death is not seen as the ultimate end to something, but rather, as part of a larger cycle. There is life in death and death in life. Communication with ancestors continues: the death of a family member is transfigured into something akin to a living memory. Many primitive cultures venerated not only creator gods, but also destroyer or destructive gods. There is a primal power that is the other side of the coin of creation, and sometimes in order to create one must first destroy. In a seeming contradiction, some powerful Tibetan meditations involving visualizing death highlight and emphasize the act of living. Sometimes the significance of something isn’t apparent until we ponder its absence. In a similar vein, seeing what happens to people undergoing mental activity on the highest and lowest part of the range of human experience can cultivate a new appreciation for mental health, perhaps even making people develop a respectful fear of mind-altering substances.

The Altar to Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun is also an examination of what is sacred or profane in people’s lives. What makes that object that someone picks up or that thought that someone keeps extra special? Is there an aura that we infuse on things that we attach meaning to? By asking these questions, one can look at everything around them and see them with a new value. There is sheer magic in the spider-web in the corner, in the dramatic whirl of a fingerprint, in a breath of air visualized in the cold winter air–moments where someone closes his or her hands just to feel the very “meatness” of their flesh, where there is a closing of a circuit of thought feeling and the physical, where it is amazing that a lump of flesh can see, hear, and form something as powerful and mysterious as thought.

More than anything I want people to leave The Altar to Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun with a new appreciation of life. Just as the retablos start and end with gratitude to God, The Altar to Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun in the end is about giving thanks to the art gods and to a Higher Power. It is no wonder that people want to see the face of God everywhere: The very fact that everything has met and manifested itself the way it has is a miracle, a gift from God.