A Permanent Temple in Paradise

Debra Klein has written a great feature at the Daily Beast about David Best’s new Temple at the Paradise Ridge Winery in Sonoma- a permanent structure made of steel, now installed between “TRUTH” and “LOVE” in their outdoor sculpture gallery which features a lot of Burner Art.

 

Entrance to Paradise Ridge

Entrance to Paradise Ridge

 

 

Previously, they had burned a David Best Temple there. People (Burners?) knew to write notes on the Temple, without ever being told.


 

From The Daily Beast:

best temple paradise

David Best Creates a Temple Made of Memories Outside San Francisco

Most works of art convey a specific message from the artist. But at David Best’s new temple in Sonoma County, visitors help build the piece out of their own memories of love and loss.

 

What do we have, in the end, when a love has gone? When a person has left for good? All that was everything between two people—a romance, a friendship, or simply day-to-day life—disappears. Only our memories never leave. But what if we want them to?

These are the thoughts that might flood visitors to David Best’s Temple of Remembrance in a meadow on the grounds of Paradise Ridge Winery. Like a vaguely Asian-themed birdcage, the deceptively ingenious rusted lattice memorial to love and loss is part shrine, part interactive do-it-yourself art project, as light visually as it is heavy emotionally.

It’s a place to remember the people you’re carrying in your mind or your heart. You can scrawl something on a flat pebble and bury it in a bird-bath bowl, or send a message to them on a piece of cloth set aflutter in the wine country wind. And, in doing so, you release your own feelings, too.

Best and his crew helped put the “burning” in the Burning Man festival fourteen years ago when they built the massive Temple of the Mind memorial in Nevada’s desert, and then dedicated it to a friend who’d died before the event began. Droves of attendees streamed inside to vent their emotions over the course of several days. The structure ignited their passions, and then the creators ignited it.

The temple idea caught fire, and while that ephemeral tradition continues as an end-of-the-festival ritual each year, the new Temple of Remembrance, on a hillside in Sonoma County, is Best’s first constructed in steel and is permanent. It sits somewhere between Truth and Love (that’s not a metaphor, those are the names of two other large Burning Man sculptures relocated to the same grassy, oak-fringed field) in a place where—despite expansive tree and vineyard vistas—visitors will find themselves looking within.

While Best’s flammable work is fleeting, the changes people experienced inside seem to stick. Best recalls a grieving father confiding that a visit let him unlock the emotional door trapping his family in grief. “Our son is free now,’” Best remembers he said. It’s a reminder that the flip side of anger is love, isn’t that why we feel both so intensely?

Although Best doesn’t consider himself particularly spiritual, he has a sixth sense about what people need to heal emotionally, be it from a trauma or a lost love, or both.

“You have to provide a place where someone can feel private, yet safe. They can be there or run away, they are not locked in,” he says. Immediately after, as if to prove his non-guru bona fides, he mentions he’s putting the finishing touches on a hot rod to race at Bonneville.

[read more at the Daily Beast…]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Temple Builders Revealed!

by Whatsblem the Pro

The Temple of Whollyness - Rendering by Gregg Fleishman

The Temple of Whollyness – Rendering by Gregg Fleishman

With David Best out of the picture for 2013, there’s been a lot of anticipation over who will build the Temple this year. There’s even been talk of more than one Temple being built; one prominent industrial arts crew has been seriously considering building their own design without funding from the Org.

Today, the honorarium grant for the 2013 Temple was awarded to the Otic Oasis‘ triumvirate of Gregg Fleishman, Melissa ‘Syn’ Barron, and Lightning Clearwater III, who will build their “Temple of Whollyness” with labor courtesy of the Otic Oasis crew.

Syn, Gregg, and Lighting - Photo by Tedshots

Syn, Gregg, and Lighting – Photo by Tedshots

USC-educated architect Gregg Fleishman has been exploring the possibilities of interlocking slotted plywood for many years. Working out of his studio in Culver City, California, he creates elegant decorative furniture, model vehicles and other sculptures, and full-sized structures, all with no metal fasteners or joints. Fleishman works miracles out of single sheets of plywood, crafting compound curves from flat-cut material. Some of his pieces even incorporate wooden springs and hinges. His “SCULPT C H A I R S” are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Yale University Art Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Not surprisingly, Fleishman expressed an interest in sacred geometry when we spoke. The concept goes back at least 3,000 years, to the time when King Solomon reportedly built his Temple on Mt. Zion to house the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon, so the story goes, received his blueprints directly from God, and his Temple was designed as a sort of architectural wave guide in which the God of the Hebrews would resonate harmonically, the way an untouched string on a guitar will vibrate when an adjacent string is plucked at the same note.

Photo by Gregg Fleishman

Photo by Gregg Fleishman

The 2013 Temple design is highly geometrical, and will be built using Fleishman’s patented connectors at each joint, capitalizing on the intrinsic strength of the arch at every opportunity in an interlocking jigsaw of triangles and pyramids. No nails, screws, or other metal connectors will be used at all. The gross form of the Temple will consist of a large central trussed pyramid, sixty-four feet tall and eighty-seven feet square, with four smaller satellite pyramids measuring twenty feet tall and twenty-nine feet at the base, intricately interlocked and ornamented in Fleishman’s signature style: Archimedes, Pythagoras, and R. Buckminster Fuller holding hands and enjoying some really good acid.

Birch Car - Photo by Gregg Fleishman

Birch Car – Photo by Gregg Fleishman

The Otic Oasis, a “wilderness outpost” intended to serve as Black Rock City’s equivalent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, debuted in 2011 and returned in 2012, providing a much-needed respite from Black Rock City’s continuous sound. There won’t be an Otic Oasis this year, as the crew will be busy with the Temple of Whollyness, but look for the Oasis’ return in 2014. As the city grows and becomes noisier, Otic Oasis is an increasingly vital resource for the dazzled and overstimulated among us, or for those of us who just want to connect with the spartan beauty and enchanting ambience of the desert.

The group also built the ‘Pistil’ sculpture inside the Man base in 2012.

'Pistil' - Photo by Gregg Fleishman

‘Pistil’ – Photo by Gregg Fleishman