It's a cool Fall night in the desert. The Full Moon is just peaking over The Wilderness of Rocks of the Catalina Mountains to the East. The soft city glow spills over Pusch Ridge to the south. I think I hear coyotes in the Canada Del Oro wash, beginning their evening hunting. Yep, sounds like they found something. [Note to city folk: Coyotes won't hurt people. They'll eat your cat or bushwhack your dog, but they will do you no harm.]
I recently quit my job as a counselor at a prison to go back to school and learn how to shoot and print black and white photographs. I'm in my second semester at Pima Community College, working on a series on Sacred Spaces, but it's becoming a series on Circles and Spirals. These two archetypal symbols seem to be coming up a lot in my work. Perhaps it's because I love symbols that are present in all cultures, representing many ideas, be it the journey in and the journey out, a sense of completion and wholeness, a moment of rest, a holding of hands. Or maybe the Circle and the Spiral just show up because they do, like images in night dreams that make no logical sense but feel right to the sleeper. Who knows why really. There are just here now in force, in my work.
Carrying the old Rollei and some new Ilford Delta film, I walk from the parking lot of the Catalina State Park entrance and move to the south, toward Pusch Ridge and the CDO wash. I have a new Zippo in my pocket for light-painting, and a rough idea. Just a rough idea. I'm discovering if I don't listen to the land and the wind and just force my will on the space, I just get contrived crap. But if I go a bit slow, and listen and listen some more and then listen just a bit more, an idea of an image that harmonizes with the land comes, and it all becomes my friend.
Stickers are thick in the grass from the last summer's rain. I have to lift my legs high and straight to keep the stickers from really going down my boats. I stop and look a bit. Stop again. Listen. Wander around this mesquite tree and that mesquite tree. No not there. Not there either. Then I walk back to an ant hill I saw a few moments ago. Not really an ant hill but an ant flat. Here in the desert, black ants can be brutal, killing the plants and grasses above their colonies. Here is just such a place with no grass, no nothing in a circle about 15 feet in diameter. I stop and listen again. I set up the Rollei on my tripod and compose and see what is there and what isn't there. This might work.
As I draw the spiral in the dirt with a stick, I see very sluggish black ants wander in and out of holes. It's a little cold. Must be tough on them, I think. I apologize as I block a couple of their holes with my stick drawing. I go back and focus and open the shutter and begin the light painting with the Zippo. This time I'm using the spiral on the ground as a guide to the flame spiral in the air. First take, not right. Second take, I don't know. Third take, maybe. After the third exposure, I back out of the frame and look at my watch and look at the moon. Probably 20 minutes are needed. I wonder around the flats near the wash, then back to my truck, then here and there among the trees. Coyotes still hunting. I can hear them. And there, an ice cold patch of air, not attached to a wash or a tree, just there. I love those patches. I'm getting a lot of stickers on my socks. I don't like it but hey. Balances out the ice patches of air I guess. I'm on the flat for a hour or two. Good night shooting.
The next day at school, I develop the negs and notice that my light painting was too low and too squat. Shit. Gotta go back out tonight and reshoot. The Moon will rise a little later but that'll be ok. The exposures of around 15 minutes at F 5.6 seem about right. Let's zero this in.
That night I return to the Ant Flat and find a bizarre development. In the 24 hours that I've been gone, the drawn dirt spiral is almost completely brushed away, not but the wind but by the tiny legs of hundreds of black ants. I redraw the spiral and nod approval to the slow cold ants. Impressive.
I light paint higher, using the exposures from last night, and I get the shot. I leave, not knowing that I've gotten the image I want. That will happen tomorrow after I develop the negatives. But I have a good feeling about it and my intuition proves me right. I also leave Catalina State Park with a new respect for Black Ants.
Notes regarding the name, etc.:
"Catalina State Park, AZ" got the nickname "The Ikon" from Steve Roach. Steve is aninternational known ambient musician who bought the limited rights to The Ikon to use as an album cover photo for his CD "Atmospheric Conditions". One day on the phone with him, he just said, "It's the Icon, man". I added the 'k' for post modernist effect. My ex-marine corps father when he listened to Steve's CD remarked that "It sounds like heavy breathing."
The Ikon has been one of my most popular images, and one that brings some of the most interesting responses from viewers. At the 1999 Tucson Museum of Art Biennial Show, a middle aged woman came up to me, pointing to The Ikon, and said "It is so amazing that you were there when They Came." I began to tell her that the only They there, were the hundreds of black ants on the ground, but she put a finger to her lips, quietly shushed me, and slowly backed away.
Recently, the Mythic Journeys 2004 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, used the Ikon as the logo of their conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of Joseph Campbell's birth and the role of myths in our world. The powers that be, flew me out, not only to create an art installation of alfalfa, lights, music and images for the related art show for the conference, but also putting me up at the Hyatt Regency in Downtown Atlanta for the four day conference itself, to just be Stu.
The Ikon was everywhere at the Hyatt, from large plasma screens behind the large convention stage to the small Powerpoint screens in the smaller conference rooms; from a huge banner spanning the stairs to the cover of the brochure; on the front page of the Mythic Journeys web site to little square bumper stickers. The first day it was moving to me to see The Ikon everywhere, so proudly shown. By the fourth day, it just made me laugh. Dave Lewis, a friend and sculptor in Tucson at the Toole Shed, jokes with me that there is 'too much Stu' in Tucson, referring to a time a few years ago when I was in a lot of local shows in a row. I felt like calling him from the lobby of the Hyatt saying "Dave, you ain't seen Too Much Stu until you've come here." I was joking with friends at the conference that we should put my 'ubiquitous image' as one person called it, on prophylactics and call them "I-Kondoms", but they didn't get the joke. I forget only folk in Tucson know it as the Ikon.
I have to admit, when I got home to Tucson from the conference, I put an Ikon bumper sticker on my back of my Pathfinder. What can I say.