Pale Lens, Frederick John Eversley

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. -William Blake, 1793, in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell". Energy. Something that may not seem beautiful, but in Pale Lens by Frederick John Eversley, it shows just that. The piece is based off the idea of the manipulation of energy, using materials such as cast polyester to do so. The piece was created in 1970 and is located in the Forms of Thought gallery, which is quite apropos, because of how abstract it is to outsiders, like the human mind itself. When I first walked up to the piece, I expected it to be like a mirror and show my reflection, but maybe that’s just me being vain. I chose this piece because of the way it made me think about a different way to see the world around me and how other people see it differently than I do. It showed other places in the room in a contorted manner, not unlike how someone’s thoughts might seem to another person. It also made me think about how things aren’t always what they seem and how you may expect one thing and find another because of the way I expected it to be like a mirror and it wasn’t. Another great aspect of this piece is how it makes you curious and gets you thinking about how it works. I started experimenting with it by hovering my hand by different sides of the piece (while making sure not to touch it because rules are rules) to see how it would reflect and I was really intrigued by the different ways my hand was shown. The amount of complexity in the design of Pale Lens is no coincidence seeing as Frederick was originally an engineer. His art was created as experimentation with the controlling of light and energy. The piece shows the beauty in curiosity, an understanding of the world, and how sometimes a little bit of a twisted perspective of the world around you can be a good thing, depending on how you look at it. This has been Nora Agah with another bulldog podcast.