“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality
Reflection ‘Series XI
Deborah Ballard
2011, Cast Stone, Mixed Media
Hall Collection
Dallas, Texas
“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
HARROW
1992
by Linnea Glatt
Lubben Plaza
Dallas, TX
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Buddha
Liu Yonggang, Chinese, b. 1964
China, 2013
Painted Steel
Crow Collection of Asian Art
Dallas, Texas
“To preserve the silence within–amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens–no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Paths
Steinunn Thorarinsdottir
Cast Aluminum
Dallas, Texas
“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Chapel Ceiling
Thanksgiving Square
Dallas, Texas
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Plano, Texas
“You are water
I’m water
we’re all water in different containers
that’s why it’s so easy to meet
someday we’ll evaporate together.”
― Yoko Ono
Thanksgiving Square
Dallas, Texas
“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Hall Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas
Background:
Reflection Series XI
Deborah Ballard
2011, Cast Stone, Mixed Media
Foreground (blurred)
The Stainless Internet
George Tobolowsky
“Matilda said, “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable…”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
McKinney Avenue Transit Authority
Dallas, Texas
“It’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don’t even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we ‘fail’ to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything–obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Bill Chance 