PROCESS: Mosque Puppets

Continuing a personal investigation of connections between Islamic architecture, puppetry and art,  I recently completed this set of characters who reside inside a contemporary walled city.  While different in culture and perspective, they share an enlightened perspective and tolerance of others differences.

SELF PORTRAITS: Silhouettes

Upon returning from a multi-faceted, sensory overloaded trip to New York, my assistant Dave and I completed this series of composites in succession as shown.   Integrating new stimuli and working with the hungry ghosts of drive, competition and greed, I find a clearer space better able to distinguish between outer noise and inner truth.

PROJECTS FOR CREATIVE LIVING: Advisory Council

 

  

When "stuck" or overwhelmed by circumstance it's helpful to have an advisory council of interesting and wise individuals. Sometimes we need all the help we can get!

The Gift of Biology

Learning about a congenital abnormality you've carried around with you your entire life is humbling.  A ticking time bomb, the Acella Express to Strokesville revealed.  Relief ("it's not my fault"), anger ("why has it taken 57 years to figure this out?"), excitement ("you mean I get to live longer?"), confusion ("you mean I get to live longer?"), guilt ("why me, and not my predecessors?")..... A grandmother (my namesake) who died at age 40 and a father who died at 74; all sharing a similar Gift of Biology.

MEDITATIONS: Imaginination and Invention

“I imagine, therefore I am…..”
Rene Descartes

Imagination is both the filter and the vehicle through which I understand, transform, and embody the physical world..... A walk in the woods becomes a symphony; a mountain, the fabric of a great tapestry; and a road trip to the wedding of a widowed parent a meditation on renewed life in the face of loss.

  

 

ICONOGRAPHY: New Section

Integrating old and new images produces new iconography linking past and present, creating opportunities to think about things in new ways and create new narratives.

Check out the new Iconography section in Imaginings on the Arts for the People website:
http://artsforthepeople.com/imaginings_iconography.html

OASIS: Creating Space

Arts for the People's future workshop space has been completed and awaits spring for classes to begin.  Thanks to Nancy Kosiorek for christening the space with her gift of salt from the Himalayas and for naming the space the Oasis.  And gratitude to artist/painter Lindsay Pallermo for nailing the vision and color scheme.  Collaborating on a mural design that would echo the natural landscape of Bramble Hill Farm , we credit Wolf Kahn's pastel drawings for inspiration and their suggestive rather than explicit treatment of the subject matter for inspiration.

THE SUPPER PARTY

Invited to invent a place setting for Judy Orlando's upcoming show at the Archetype Gallery in Atlanta, I chose to invite Ares, known, among other things, as the Greek god and archetypal force of war, destruction, “manliness”, and courage”.

Its been over thirty years since Judy Chicago’s installation first hit the scene and although there remains much work to do (women’s rights has been declared THE ISSUE of the new millennium), it’s time to include Ares at the supper table with an invitation to participate in the process of co-creating a new paradigm of persona, one with a wider range and complexity of attribute. Aggression transformed and re-directed creatively towards the greater good, results in  psychological and spiritual integration and wholeness. It is a model of abundance that promotes cooperation and inclusion rather than fear and scarcity.

Its time for Ares summon tribal leaders to BYOF (Bring your Own <white> Flag), create a more inclusionary model, embrace the Divine Feminine, and harness destructive impulses.

The placemat is a two-dimensional digital composite, the plate and spatula a three dimensional mixed media construction designed to suggest relics that need to be ingested, digested, and transformed.

MEDITATIONS: Spring

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
-David Foster Wallace

This sculpture, placed in an outdoor garden, is a meditation on youth and the passage of time. It celebrates budding sexuality, the seeds of our future selves, and our connection to the earth.


How many of us have traveled through this season unaware of the gift of the bloom?

(Spring. 2010)





These past few years have been marked by a growing interest in creating small outdoor shrines and gardens; meditations on loved ones and prayers for a greater planetary trend in earth based consciousness.

(Detail, Spring. 2010)

Spring, and everything outside is growing

....I am filled with you. 

Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul….

- Rumi 

(Detail, Spring. 2010)

MEDITATIONS: Forgiveness

Creating a work of art is not a harmless thing. .. Art is extraordinarily powerful and important. It challenges peoples lives. So there are two choices: either you create black magic to turn people’s heads, or you create some kind of basic sanity. Those are the two possibilities, so you should be very, very careful.

- Chogyam Trungpa

Prayer flags are traditionally used to promote peace, compassion, strength, and wisdom. Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread the good will and compassion into all pervading space.






(Installation: The Wedding Dress, accompanied by 44 flags. 2008)

MEDITATIONS: On Prayer

"... in the actual day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
– David Foster Wallace



Photo: On Top of the World (digital composite)

MEDITATIONS: Sanctuaries in Time

In a world saturated with negative imagery, fear, and uncertainty, I aim to create transcendent imagery, providing an opportunity to contemplate a physical moment/space in time with time eternal.

(Namesake, 2010)                                                                             (Peruvian Origins and Inca Kola, 2010) 

Creative work is a prayer, a meditation on the eternal where the creative act serves as both filter and change agent.  Connected to something larger than ourselves, mysterious and eternal, the ordinary becomes sacred and, in A.J. Heschel’s words,  “beyond the confines of measured time”. 

 In Peruvian Origins and Inca Kola, the modern world and ancient sit side by side. In Namesake, time and memory are suggested to be set both inside time and beyond it.