SINSYRIASLY YOURS...

Most recent feature article of my piece "SiNSYRIASLY YOURS..."

I'll never forget seeing my first set of Domino pieces laid out on the floor of my home when I was little and watching the stacked pieces knock against each other to fall in sequence. I don't ever recall learning the rules of the game but came to learn it by observing political events.

The Viet Nam War began while I was in grammar school and the term Domino Theory crept into common usage in the vernacular. The nightly news fed us a steady stream of our images on our black and white TV of exhausted soldiers and helicopters and damaged lives. On the home front I saw the war affect us at home as my father worried about my brother getting drafted to fight in a war that he knew well from the horrors of after having survived World War 2 which included the Siege of Warsaw when the Nazis invaded.

I lived on the cusps of the new American Reality of peace and stability and the emigre life of wartime refugees. Fortunately for me the war in Viet Nam ending before I reached drafting age and the memories could subside as well as any interest in politics. At that time the current of war shifted out of Southeast Asia to where it burned more brightly in the Middle East and what became news fodder was the conflict in Israel and Egypt and Palestine. Time Magazine was filled weekly with accounts of terrorist bus bombers and a rather pervasive guerrilla warfare which we really associated with Viet Nam although its precedent was well set with the O.S.S. and the early C.I.A.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria represented what we now know as a 20+ year war and conflict we have yet to see the truly terminated. From watching images of black rubber lifeboats and people of all ages wading ashore and leaving behind large hills of orange life preservers to newly pitched refugee camps. There are  now contained millions of the dispossessed within the confines of the camps.

Here are the numbers:

SYRIA.  6.848.865

AFGHANISTAN 2,840,672

SUDAN 2,372,656

MYANMAR 1,209,086

UKRAINE 8,046.560

For comparison purposes, this from BBC 

European Refugee Movements After World War 2

By Bernard Wasserstein

By 1959 some 900,000 European refugees had been absorbed by west European countries. In addition, 461,000 had been accepted by the USA, and a further 523,000 by other countries. But many 'hard-core' refugees still remained in camps. At that point the United Nations launched an ambitious effort to resolve the refugee problem once and for all.

World Refugee Year, in 1959-1960, was designed as a 'clear the camps' drive. It achieved some significant results - at any rate in Europe. By the end of 1960, for the first time since before World War Two, all the refugee camps of Europe were closed.

But the global refugee problem was far from solved. In Africa and Asia millions of fugitives from persecution, hunger, and natural disasters continued to scramble for secure homes. Europe, hitherto mainly an exporter of refugees, henceforth became a net importer. Today the United Nations estimates that over 17 million asylum seekers, refugees and stateless people are seeking homes worldwide.

At this time I won't delve into the key players in the creation of this world picture.

Gypsy Bacon

She lays naked and warm

Next to her purse with the things inside left to confuse the mice that come at night to visit

A swahili phrase book next to a card with

Hot rolls Dumb ass on it

 Thinking,  go ahead why don’t you take that one back to your nest and chew on that for awhile

They speak in high pitched tones

Like aliens who read from their prayer scrolls

Trying to gauge the freshness of the bacon

He bought from gypsies years ago as he sat across the fire in the desert

Fate-- he lay many nights in the cold plugged into the jacket that takes energy and makes heat in your jacket as the engine runs

After he lays many nights next to his motorcycle in the dirt at night wrapped in his Masaai robes he bought on Ebay.

He searches for the turkey bone and aluminum foil to make translators to listen to advice from the ants that crawl beneath his head so he can understand

How to get along with others as well as they do

He wonders how they manage to do their jobs for the benefit of the others

they live with while his thoughts always drift towards solo journeys

She looks over his shoulder now scribbling notes she can give to the people who buy her breakfast.

He leaves cryptic notes for help on the cafeteria tray that rides down the conveyor hoping that the kitchen staff wlll read it when they clean the dishes

He scratches the fish scales and cotton that line the roof of his mouth in the morning

Trying to taste what remains of the night air

that still lingers somewhere amongst the leaves that lay cold beneath the winter trees on the hard frozen ground

His dog barks outside tied to a tree after she does her business 

She comes in happy and panting waiting for her breakfast near her water dish

She lays then down upon her pillow

The Masaai men laugh at him when he tells the story as they sit across a fire in the night heat that keeps the lions away

Reminiscent of the time he learned from the gypsies that sold him his bacon

Sufi pants and vision

She makes peanut butter sandwiches to make our dog love her better

My dog laughs out loud at vacuum cleaner jokes

 she knows she does a better job when it comes to food.

She wears Sufi pants and dreams of large stitched canvases hung in front of museum windows with large patches of grey and charcoal and white and china red so they can be seen through windows from hillsides across from the parking lots of museums

The paintings are done in warehouses with white walls 

We sew 5 foot rolls of canvas, stitched together and gessoed 

before the paints are done on the floors and hung from the walls or ceiling in warehouses owned by the Drury’s who let him paint on the weekends in place no one has ever spoken or thought of...

The curator of the museum wants a large painting to hang on the walls

I saw it in my vision this morning after reading the Anthropologie catalogue

And I know it will happen

The mouse knows you

He has small mouse names for you…

They talk about you like mice do

And know small mouse things about you…

Like how you fold your underwear and the lint in the corner of your drawer and how your notebooks smell and taste

Yes he can taste your words and your ink and he reads your words and finds comfort in them. He eats them, yes your words are like food to the mouse.

Your pages line his nest, torn to pieces like the dreams you once wrote for only you to see. Now he sleeps his tiny muzzle turned under his paws and tiny claws, dozing....resting breathing, he sighs amongst your words, comforted and dreaming tiny mouse dreams where he runs in tunnels and his dozing limbs run and jerk as he thinks of running in his dreams….

Productivity and Creativity

Today someone came into my office asking why I do all the things I do-most people are content with home and their family life. To this I replied that everybody has other things they would like to do they just let someone else do their thinking for them, i.e. :

What do you want to do that for?
No one around here does stuff like that?
Oh I don't know how to do that?
Stupid-you're too stupid!
Don't ask any questions?
I don't know how to do that.
What good is it?
Why bother?
No one can ever change that?
Those people have been at it for a thousand years...

It's pretty hard to go through life without going into agreement with something, I guess why marketing exists but when it comes to out talent and creativity you have to be vigilant and on the prowl for suppressive thought, if you agree with it you will allow it.

Thin Blue Line

Have been doing lots of work on this lately and viewpoints are beginning to shift or maybe not. Previously I spent time on the control element and now am seeing a tangent of this which is not talking about it as a result of embarassment and fear and how much that traps a person. I guess giving up your ability to communicate is a loss of control as well. Entrapment can be physical, threat of loss of environment, children, belongings and status.

Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.

Thin BLue Line-Domestic Violence

Have been working on a new piece called Thin Blue Line-Black Eyed Madonna. Initial interviews have been done and after speaking to counselors at The Network for Sexual Violence it seemed that the crux of the problem centers around "control". I don't know that I am in agreement with this yet as I look at line drawings of children that they use to indicate where someone touched them inappropriately or worse.
Control has now taken on a new meaning with sinister overtones. One doesn't think of control as a bad thing when operating a car or plane or a nuclear reactor or when walking your child across the street but in a relationship look out it is a veritable minefield.
Control in a relationship has driven many off the brink more often than any other element. This bad control then starts one down the slippery slope into the cauldron of blame and regret. I think this is the direction my studies are beginning to take me.