By Joshua Le Suer

Regarding the little ceramic canyons in Wayne Higby's "Thresholds" exhibition at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, they are reminescent of the vast, desolate canyons the space travelers roam through after their ship sinks in the movie "Planet of the Apes."

The canyons in that film are lonely because they once teemed with human life, but Nancy Weekly, head of collections at BPAC, says Higby's canyons are about the solitude that encourages reflection, not the loneliness that encourages brooding and despair.

In "Planet of the Apes," mankind has devolved into a lesser simian species, but the "Thresholds" canyons, explains Weekly, are intended to be "koans" of sorts, objects of meditation through which people can reach higher planes of existence, join their conscious self with the cosmos.

"Planet of the Apes" ends with Charleton Heston prostrate in the crashing surf, smashing his fist into the ground before the Statue of Liberty and bewailing humanity's tendency toward self-destruction, while Weekly says that meditation on the canyons should end with a sense of peace.

Canyons, with their erosion-etched beauty, stand as austere paradoxes, gorgeousness created without the hand of man, but which require the presence of man to appreciate them.

In one corner of the crabbed room set aside for the Higby exhibition, in a glass case, is a milky slab of porcelain that looks somewhat like a headstone carved out of brie, whereas the smaller canyons, each on their own stands, resemble tobacco-stained mouths opened in little O's of surprise.

Weekly states that Higby graduated from porcelain to ceramic, and didn't even intend for a porcelain canyon to be in the exhibition.

Education curator, Jerry Mead pleaded for a porcelain item as a contrast piece.

The little canyons, with their cocoas and their walnuts and their fawns and mouse-duns, very much suggest the earthiness of the Colorado landscape they represent. They're sensuos pieces that suggest the hardiness of Southwestern American people.

These canyons are too barren even for scorpions, coyote and bandits.

The porcelain piece, however, is a ghostly slab, ethereal; it seems to float outside of the person appraising it instead of burying itself in the eye like the smaller, variegated canyons.

Higby, according to information provided by Weekly, used to go questing on horseback as a child living in Colorado Springs through the wide-ranging canyons, found these craggy, natural-made bowls ample storehouses for the myriad memories of peacefulness he associates with the landscape.

The 30-year teacher at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred State University uses Raku ceramics, a Japanese art form, to trigger an "internal inquiry" in the people who consider his art.

Higby is quoted in the material provided as saying the following of his work: "Earth and fire, light, time, space: my work is a meditation on the relationship between human mind and material existence. Clay and glaze offer a sensual means for entering the contemplative. Scaled to the body, the work presents contained space that opens to a vast panorama. It offers an invitation to an out of body experience. It is not about landscape."

Higby's "Thresholds" exhibiton will run through June 15.

Stamped on the featureless back of each of the small canyons is what Weekly calls Higby's logo, a monogram of sorts, a cartouche, a centuries-old Egyptian mark used as a kind of signature.

Also, tucked in a pit behind one of the pieces, a 2002 Raku work titled "Shadow Gap," are two dimples and an upside-down curve that resembles a smiley face. It's a very humanizing touch to think of Higby concealing a private joke like this, like a columnist hiding a secret message to a lover in the opening letters of an article, but Weekly states that he would never do anything so "frivolous."