Madison Cawein, "Cairo: Mother of the World"

Madison Cawein, Cairo: Mother of the World promo image

WheelHouse Art is pleased to present Madison Cawein's Cairo: Mother of the World.

Cairo: Mother of the World, new work by Madison Cawein opens with a reception for the artist on Friday, October 13, 6:00 - 8:00pm. This show features timeless images of the pyramids and traditional farming in Cairo that have changed little for millennia. Cairo: Mother of the World is presented in conjunction with the Louisville Photo Biennial and will consist of multiple works of photographs and oil paintings.

The exhibition continues through November 25, 2023.

“Regard this world as I do, like a horseman who stops in the shade of a tree for a while, and then rides on.” —Prophet Muhammad

When we visited Cairo in early 2009, the mother of our host, a Sufi teacher, told me that “Cairo is the mother of the world.” There were as many people in Cairo as in all of Australia. We might see five streams of cars in three lanes. My first sight of the Great Pyramid, Khafre, was from a car.

The pyramids in my photographs are over 2500 years old, which means that mastodons still roamed in the Arctic when they were built. The farms with palms above and other crops below are unchanged for centuries longer than that.

Cairo is a river city. The only water in Egypt is the Nile. There are canals branching from it, and irrigation channels branching from the canals. The channels are filled tidally by the moon. The solid-seeming beams of light under the trees are made of mist and also from extremely fine dust from the desert.

To be in Cairo is to be aware of the passage of millennia, to realize that life is a fleeting gift, and to feel the continuity with other lives over time.

The paintings of fire that accompany the photographs came to me unsought and unexpectedly in my Santa Fe studio a few weeks before actual fires began in New Mexico in 2022. I was thinking only in images. I titled the series “Civilization.” Fire was necessary for us to survive and civilize, and now threatens us as well. I feel the paintings resonating with photos, also speaking to the passage of Time.

-- Madison Cawein