Art - Will Cares

This piece has returned to nature, as intended by the artist.

Spend a bit of time contemplating Will Cares’ Crossroads and you will have a good idea of both the depth and breadth of his work. The arched walkway is created from saplings that were cleared to create #18 fairway in the Mountainview Golf Course. The “recycled” material was bound with common bailing wire, reinforced with uprights and shaped in the form of an “x” with arms that are four feet wide, eight feet tall and twenty feet long with a circular hoop connecting the tunnels and opening to a roof of trees and sky.

Stand in the circle and in your mind’s eye begin to pull back from this spot so you can see the entire work. Note the construction techniques common to various Native American cultures of Michigan. Pull back further and you will see the “crossroads” of Thompsonville where at one time the two major railroads serving this area intersected. In these two images we are reminded of all the physical crossroads that are places of exchange, cultural, economic and spiritual. There are the town and village crossroads, the veins of the body and the leaf, the lattice of a spider web, covered bridges, arbors, trellises and many Christian churches.

“Art,” according to Cares, “can act as a kind of crossroads or nexus, linking disparate streets of culture into a single visual and conceptual experience.” Of this “crossroads” he says:

“As a society we are apt to see things in opposition, or at cross purposes to each other. We see a road and think, ‘one way leads East, the other way leads West.’ Yet any straight line or path walked on the surface of the globe is not simply linear... whichever direction we take, we will come back to where we began ... West becomes East and North becomes South.”