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equally implicit in our own. 

We negotiate daily those more obvious and highly-mediated lines of demarcation that divide nations, cultures, races, classes, generations, sexes, iconographies and languages. But we do so, as Casas' art so relentlessly demonstrates, more or less at the mercy of that more mysterious border between language itself and the actions, images, values and imperatives it signifies and validates. The perplexity of this condition is only intensified by our efforts to locate ourselves comfortably to one side or the other of these cultural fault line, since these efforts inevitably result in our discovery that the rifts run, not to one side or the other but through the very centers of our being.

So, gradually we are forced to acknowledge that the safe, boundaried haven of autonomy we seek probably doesn't exist and that, finally, as far as our consciousness is concerned, nothing exists but the borders -- that everything we know and do, we know and do in terms of those fluid and unstable areas of intersection between what we know and how we know it, boundaries which perpetually and reflexively divide, define and subvert signs and symbols, actions and attitudes [[strikethrough]] which [[/strikethrough]] that have no meaning distinct from one another.

Casas encapsulates the artist's stake in this paradoxical situation in a succinct paraphrase of Korzybski: "Language makes us see," he notes in one of his conceptual diagrams, and "image makes us talk." But, where other artists in recent years have taken this bottom-line, post-modern axiom as an occasion for despair and an excuse to retreat into academic exegesis or salon decoration, Casas, early in his career, extended this observation

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