Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance Paperback - 2006

Media reviews

"At first glance, one doesn’t quite see what one is looking at. Quasha, it seems, has found a batch of wildly eccentric rocks. Then one realizes what is going on: in each case, two rocks have been joined at precisely the point that turns them into a unity. These are configurations so delicately balanced that the slightest touch would topple them…The results are astonishing…For Quasha, an axis is like an intention: a force that, as it generates possibilities, gives them a contingent but intelligible order. Every esthetic advances a hope, for truth or clarity or beauty or whatever. Quasha’s esthetic is driven by the hope that possibility will always be open and fresh, never predictable."
—Carter Ratcliff, Art in America

"So jaded am I by today’s art, full of strategic moves and empty technological gesture, that George Quasha’s Axial Stones become nothing less than a wake up call. These balancing acts contain high wire energy and at the same time absorb gravities from all directions sending out primordial messages that one is always longing to hear (whether one knows it or not). As pleasurable as these "coupling" rocks are to look at, the core experience is that of the mind weighing various details of its own cosmology one upon the other...in just so many ways."
—Gary Hill, artist

"George Quasha is an artist who manifests the mystery of a stone’s interior nature without ever penetrating its surface. He discerns the internal distribution of dense masses and delicate striations by discovering the axis that allows one stone to balance upon another. These matings are unforeseen because they are unforeseeable. Indeed, seeing is not the primary sense that guides his process. Instead of imposing his aesthetic will, Quasha submits to the dictates of stones which communicate to him through a language of tactile discourse."
—Linda Weintraub, author of Art at the Edge and Over and In the Making

Citations

• Library Journal, 01/01/2007, Page 0