AN ELLIPTICAL CORONA of ultramarine pigment defines a territory. Within this terrain are three distinct circular realms. At the center, a tall tapered shaft is articulated with black and white increments. Here, outlined by a stark white halo of plowed dust, is laid a plot of fertile humus. Tethered to the shaft, standing on this dark earth, is a magnificent live bullock. This creature is celebrated, his hide bleached with flour, his horns gilded. On either side, separated by the corona’s floor of raked red sand, are piled round mounds of matter. A multitude of huge marble eggs forms a contrast to the opposite polarity, a conical pyre, a bramble of charred wood and walking canes engulfing a handwrought and corroded copper sphere.
Aware of the moment only, stoic against the tension levied from the polar extremities of the great enclosure, the nobility that is the bullock arbitrates from the epicenter. Indentured to the tapered notation of order, distance, measure, the beast embodies all that is cyclic. But what is to come and where will it all go? Mortality is the essence. Stacked like cannon fodder, the eggs swell with potentiality. Simultaneously, the huge pyre threatens to ignite, to consume the sphere scarred by human will. Will the eggs break before the pyre burns?
Center of its universe, innocent and calm, knowing no time, does the poised beast know the future as it comes or only the present as it passes?
— by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, photographs by Amit Pasricha