A Tesseract for Art & Scholarship
Meshell Sturgis
Tabita Rezaire’s Hoetep Blessings (2016) is a femme-inspired graphic-motion picture that traces the etymological roots of the word “hotep” through to a reclamation of what Rezaire refers to as the “ancient sacred feminine wisdom” of “‘hoe’tep.” A colorful octahedral pyramid, or the representation of two pyramids combined in the 4D realm, first appears with lava bursting from either side. This geometric shape shows up several times throughout the video, as an animation of varying colors and echoed in Rezaire’s alluring yogic postures. Rezaire uses the spinning and surface-changing octahedral pyramid to travel from “http://” to the Kiswahili “hutuapo” which means a state of perpetual peace.
Similarly, a tesseract is the visual description of a cube in the fourth dimension that is popular in science fiction as a time travel agent such as in Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 A Wrinkle in Time. In this book and later film (and according to Albert Einstein), the fourth dimension is time. Physicists have argued that there may be a total of ten dimensions: nine construct the fabric of space, and one for time. Manipulated by the gravitational pull, time dilates near black holes. Tesseracts fold time such that travel through the fifth dimension can occur. However, as with Rezaire’s work, this Tesseract for Art and Scholarship shows how institutionalized quantum mechanics alone are faulty.
With slippages abounding, this 8-sided tesseract asks you to re-consider which epistemological and ontological connections can alternately be made through a sustained focus on the multifaceted sides of imagination, production, dissemination, accretion, modification, liquidation, apparition, and annihilation. Starting with the condensed package of art and scholarship at the center, work your way outward following each unfolding panel. Be sure to avoid the black holes. If you happen to get caught in one, you’ll notice that time slows, logic bends, and you enter a process of becoming something-someone different. With that said, perhaps it would be better to start with a black hole after all.
