Archive for the 'Thoughts' Category
Sign Removal
November 9, 2009Crows Follow Us Carrying Chimes
November 8, 2009See accompanying video here: While. Waiting. To. Explode. – Calling the Crows
On The
Walk, Video, Afternoon:
Brisk, cold wind pushes us as we search out new places on the inner trails of the island. We walk from home over Covey’s land to Little Trot John Park. Pass by horse with the sharpest, most cutting eyes i have ever seen. I don’t know the names of any of the horses boarded in the barns back there but i always stop and try to talk to them. The one we passed on our way out to explore kept trying to eat my hand thinking i brought a carrot. He was smaller, young looking, dark but not really black or brown. Cole left me trying to get to know this horse, continuing ahead.
I caught up and we walked up and around into part of the Park where a few people on the island have gotten together to start a community garden. It looked as though they were trying to kill the grass in a 30×40 section of land with cardboard piled a top with mulch. There was a a decent rug too, in one spot. There was no mulch on the rug. We walked through the dieing grass, and down towards the transfer station in order to head into the marshy woods situated across from it.
It was the end of the trail we had blazed yesterday when we entered the woods higher on Brackett Street. We were aiming to find another way back onto a trail we had already travelled. We passed these amazing marsh plants that look like the above water version of sea anemones. They were visibly succulent, low, flowering, yellowish green, with reddish buds — beautifully squishy islands in the marshy areas. It was unfortunate to stomp on them, and i kept thinking of how maybe we should be trying to protect them more (instead of stomping them.) Still we used them for stepping stones through the parts that were hard to navigate due to the stranglehold of the invasive barberry and bittersweet.
We meet back up with the marked trail that, we guess, the Peaks Island Land Preserve maintains. The trail is marked with three vertical dots in white spray paint about 8 feet up on a tree lining the path. A man we ran into yesterday had been going over these blazes with glow in the dark spray paint, he said, so his wife could walk the path at night. It was a very remarkable gesture to witness.
Today, an even more remarkable gesture occurred. As we walked up a branch of the trail we have yet to experience, we came across a wind chime. It hung on one branch of a small tree that seemed to proclaim we had reached a high ground, a stopping point, a meditation spot. However, in all of its perfectness, it had lost three of its rods to worn out strings and they lay in the leaves, silent. Cole thought this sad and wanted to do something. I immediately thought we should take it home and fix it and bring it back. He thought we could tie them back on right there. This was attempted but to no avail as the strings simply needed to be replaced and were too short to tie up. Therefore, my first thought prevailed and we decided we would take it home to fix and bring it back for whoever it belonged to enjoy anew.
Taking up the sturdy, rusted, metal crate i had slung a stick through and carried in one hand — the stick was warmer to carry than the metal itself — and the not worn through string the chimes were hanging from in the other, we continued. The chimes jingled as we shuffled through leaves back out to the main road. Cole said he thought they were happy. They certainly sounded happy to be moving. It re-affirmed my belief that most things are happier when they’re moving. Maybe happiness is created in moving. Even if that is not true or relevant at all to the chimes, they made wonderful sounds being carried through the November woods.
The crows thought so too. Before long, there were caw ca CAWS flying towards us. They lighted in the trees above us, and had corralled Heta back, possibly from the road as we were getting closer to cars. They kept following us and cawing, and cawing, and flying above us all the way up to the road, and even then on the road some too. The jingling chimes went with us and so did the crows.
We cut back over Brackett, back over to where Covey boards the horses leaving the crows behind, still cawing at us but not moving into different territory. We were back in the horses territory and there was another really striking darker and slightly larger horse in the corral across from the one we saw on our way heading out. This horse I wish I knew the name of. He let us rub him a little and we would have stayed and spent more time but there was a man with two small dogs who were following our dog. So we walked away from the horse whose name i wish i knew and he started whinnying at us to come back. He whinnied until we were out of sight over the hill and i kept saying “bye” loud enough so he could hopefully hear, but i did feel bad we left him so quickly.
We began to talk about all the animals we had seen today and it dawned on me that when i did my medicine cards with my cousin in Utah a few years back i had pulled both a Crow and a Horse. Also a Mouse (which eats pie i leave on the counter) a Butterfly (which we hatch) an Armadillo (which Cole and i just drew together) a Lizard (orange salamander things in NH) and a Dolphin (Minke whale Cole and I saw sailing the sunfish last fall) and I think the last one was a Fox (i can’t find the piece of paper i wrote all of it down on) (Cole has a stunning photograph of a dead coyote which i think is a comparable animal.) There are eight animals in a totem which makes up your medicine cards (one pulled for each direction i.e. north, south, east, west, northeast, soutwest etc.) You can only pull the cards once in your life, from what i remember. In other words, the animals I picked in Salt Lake would be part of my totem everywhere, i would carry them within me my whole life.
It was just a thought that struck me on the end of our walk, how all the animals that we encounter through living on this island are ones that might be related to me somehow. Possibly related to Cole as well. The coyote and the crows i think are. We need to find some medicine cards and he can draw them and find out. Staying on track though, we walked home, the chimes were still sounding the whole way.
On Longing – Susan Stewart
November 4, 2009Prologue
“Let me begin with the invisibility and blindness of the suburbs. Between classes, a fundamental slippage – the absence of the landscape of voyage. The suburbs present us with a negation of the present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future. Hence the two foci of the suburbs: the nostalgic and the technological. A butterchurn fashioned into an electric light, a refrgerator covered by children’s drawings, the industreial “park,” the insurance company’s “campus.” The celibacy of the suburbs articulates its inversion of nature: the woman becomes a sun, the man a revolving moon. Here is a landscape of apprehension: close to nature, and not sonsumed by her; close to culture, close enough to consume her. In the topography of the suburbs is revealed the topography of the family, the development , a network of social relations and their articulated absences. To walk in the suburbs is to announce a crippling, a rennunciation of speed. In the suburbs only outsiders walk, while the houses are illuminated as stages, scenes of an uncertain action. In these overapparent arrangements of interior space, confusion and distance mark the light.
The countryside: space ideal, space of childhood and death. The forest remote, water mirroring not ourselves but the infinite distance of sky. WIthin patterns of nature, we search for traces of the human: a tiny rowboat pulled up to shore, the oars folded and asleep. Perhaps a figure, but microscopic, and on the edge of some oblivion — a cliff, or the other side of the painting. Everwhere signs of cultivatoin and wilderness: the plowed field of poetic lines, the ax left leaning against a colossal tree. The countryside unfolds, maplike before us, simultaneous and immediate. And yet always the problems of horizon and distance, the problems of depth and breadth. As we begin to traverse the field of vision, the tragedy of our partial knowledge lies behind us. The distance becomes infinite, each step an illusion of progress and movement. Our delight in flying comes from the revelation of countryside as sky and sea, from the transcendence we experience over vast spaces. Yet to see the thin and disappearing signature of the jet is to see the poverty of this flight to omniscience; in each photo appears the grim machinery of the wing. In the notion of return, of cycle, of the reclamation of landscape, lies the futility and productive possibility of human making.
To walk in the city is to experience the disjuncture of partial vision/partial consciousness. The narrativity of this walking is believed by a simultaneity we know and yet cannot experience. As we turn a corner, our object disappears around the next corner. The sides of the street conspire against us; each attention suppresses a field of possibilities. The discourse of the city is a syncretic discourse, political in its untranslatability. Hence the language of the state elides it. Unable to speak all the city’s languages, unable to speak all at once, the state’s language becomes monumental, the silence of headquarters, t he silence of the bank. In this transcendent and anonymous silence is the miming of corporate relations. Between the night workers and the day workers lies the interface of light; in the rotating shift, the disembodiment of lived time. The walkers of the city travel at difference speeds, their steps the hand-writing of a personal mobility. In the milling of the crowd is the choking of class relations, the interruption of speed, and the machine. Hence the barbarism of police on horses, the sudden terror of the risen animal.
Here are three landscapes, landscapes “complete” and broken from one another as a paragraph is. And at the edge of town, the camp of the gypsies.”
Missing the Ferry Hurts
November 3, 2009On schedule, it goes in and out. With no awareness of us — of course, the captain can see us running down the hill and give an extra 30 second pause — the boat can’t see. There’s no point in me trying to put the blame on the boat anyway. Rather, i should put it on my watch. My digital watch that i haven’t let the hour fall back on, so for the past two days I’ve had to subtract an hour, look again, think I’m running late, trick myself into right now. It’s really all too much — not all days, but — today when i missed the ferry, it hurt.
The window of opportunity to devote a chunk of time to a project was clouded with the thought of getting on the ferry in two hours. Now, two has turned to four and a half. I have wasted four and a half hours waiting and missing a boat. The frustration! The disappointment! The shame! The mental effort to place blame elsewhere only to know it can only fall on myself.
7:40 not 7:45. The phone rang at 7:37 with Cole calling me to say he thought i got on an earlier boat and not to miss this one, he was waiting for me on the other side. I couldn’t find my right boot! I had taken it off because i was working on a blister and was trying to decide if a change of socks would help or just some tape around my heel. I couldn’t find my boot once i decided on tape and this after knowing i needed to run.
What was I doing up until the point of that call? There’s no mystery. I had given Heta a shower to get the muck from the beach off her. I had been watching youtube videos of Waylon Jennings in search of some old country duets. I had been driving down to the ferry at 645 only to find i hadn’t looked at the schedule right and the boat wasn’t til 7:40.
Why is my timing not in sync with the ferry? I blame it on getting accustomed to the new time change, and the fact that ghosts move my boots around so i can’t find them when i need them.
To Live on a Preserve Would Be:
September 22, 2009desirable
isolated
anti-social
a lesson in adaptation
A beautiful experience
Learning to find your place
Possibly cold if you didn’t bring the right clothes
Possibly hot if you didn’t bring the right clothes
Great for my imagination
Heta’s Dream
My Dream?
Floating Island - Alexander Asadov
As fears of global warming induced population displacement are steadily realized, the allure of waterborne aquatecture becomes more and more enticing. Designed by Alexander Asadov, this incredible floating Aerohotel features a lighter-than-air aesthetic that sits serenely atop an elegant system of supports. Conceived as an elevated aquatic structure replete with hanging gardens, the space-age floating island preserves the entire extent of the ecosystem beneath it, contrasting with man-made islands that disrupt their immediate environment with tons of gravel fill.
http://design-pedia.blogspot.com/2009/02/again-green-design-stuffs-architecture.html
Gaining the Confidence to Define What to Change (An Example of Talking oneself into Changing)
September 16, 2009Questions:
Do some people — who once understood a way of communicating — stop understanding, once ones efforts are driven to master more communicative techniques in order to get other/more people to understand? Should one be conscious of retaining all ways of communicating or decide one-way is better than another? Is large-scale communication just hard and often misunderstood or does it need to have more effort put into clear pathways that are accessible to all?
Clarity seems to be the underlying issue. Clarifying how one was communicating to begin with, deciding what must change and what must be retained in order to be understood. Analysis of what ways you are successfully communicating or failing to communicate then point towards awareness, disregard, desire, carefulness, love, response-ability, and looking intently at the parts that need to be looked at.
It is important to be able to pick something apart. To learn to be objective in order to subjectively respond to the whole (to what pieces have been gathered.) Ignoring or not noticing — a general unobservant disposition — can lead to a constant state of ignorance. Although ignorance is bliss, it is also a huge blockade in being a worthy participant, engaged with those who are aware of a shared situation. People are only in situations they create for themselves, so why would one not be held accountable for something they have created?
This (irresponsibility) is often the case due to an individual’s inability to cope with what they have created. It is a lack of self awareness, a disregard for a seemingly “failed” product. There is a need to learn how to be proud of failures and embrace them in order to preserve any indicator of how to fail less the next time. Therefore, one must be confident in their creation and cope with whatever it produces. Acknowledging all successes and failures and continuing to engage on all and every level shows an effort to understand all that is perceptible.
The question then becomes why would someone choose to not see something right before their eyes? It is again determined that they choose not to cope or that they are blind(ignorant). Perhaps, blindness is a by-product of cultural conditioning or it is a chosen trait or it is an un-educated vision. This is why knowledge is powerful and important, as it helps one to see.
Ree Morton
September 10, 2009Showing at the Drawing Center http://drawingcenter.org/exh_upcoming.cfm?exh=661
all that is drawn is subjected to the FATAL BLOW, not in a circle but in a circle with a V in it so as not to waste space that does not need to be hit by the fatality! some of the space is saved!
First attempt: Writing For a Newspaper
August 25, 2009Jamie Hogan, contributing voice on our local
— island and city —
Art Scene
recently contacted me wondering about
myself/my collaborator/our collective
periodically writing into the Island Times.
Since my practice is individually and collectively
based on the necessity of multiple perspectives
— and responses to perspectives affecting our abilities —
to understand the land
( a family, a community, an island, a landscape, a place, an environment. )
It seems appropriate to make a foray into a written forum
to put forth ideas,
and yet an other, island perspective.
Living on an island, albeit a hop skip and a jump from Portland,
leaves one disconnected
— for whatever length of time we sojourn here —
to the wondrous world of unbounded perspectives.
(Un)defined Perspective 1: On Photography:
Cole has gained access to a Vermont manufactured, Zone Six, 8 x 10 camera. For those camera lovers out there, you know how good this makes one feel to run such a beautiful tool.
The camera is so stunning in fact that Rhonda Berg and Eleanor Morse, on their way down City Point Road to Centennial Beach, became enthralled with the site set up in our backyard. From where i was inside i could hear ” Look at that, is that a camera?” and one of them say “Yes, it is!” The hope in which they asked the questions to each other, the tone in their voices that said “Look, you don’t see this anymore, i can’t remember the last time i saw one of these,” made myself and Cole walk outside to say “Hello.”
Rhonda recounted
when a man used to come to her house and take her family’s portrait.
I asked, “was it at Christmas or for a wedding?”
She said, that she didn’t recall there being a reason.
An amazing bit of memory to share at a time when camera’s
are most typically mobile,
point and shoot,
anybody-can-press-a-button-tools-to-record-everything.
I walked away from our short gathering
realizing what brought us all into the backyard to converse
was the camera itself.
The camera was the occasion and there need not be more.
Molly Hunt – A Travel Log
July 17, 2009
“A Travel Log”
we shared a mango
while the sun appeared
an object to touch
and one
for Martha’s store
with the german shepard
guarding the door
(Later, Martha filling pitchers with water)
and Carolyn in her orchard
a bounty of children
eating quiche
between
ecclesiastical bluffs
the supreme public vista
harborview
a private view
three floors up
a rusty escape
we guess in the dark
and teeter in the day
glasses
since she was 11
seeing magnified
and always looking
dressed for Walters
we climbed under the table
to sing-a-long
the black pearl
from stern to bow
the deck
the dock
sail tags clanking on aluminum masts
even with the water
and the dark hiding everything else
to jump in
to be submerged
as if there were no edge
John Pawtucket drawing sails
a very young captain
saying how he cared
and the heart is whole again
patched
Good shot my lady
Lady Albion slinking under the moon
at dawn
planes come and go
by radio
a trip achieved
with only certain specifications
and without a sailor’s precision
but
sailors follow the wind
and so do islands
chart the summer sky
where MaryAnne
at Mansion beach
guarding the plovers
sewed buttons on a curtain
Jess and Wild Bill stayed in the sand
the sun coloring them
talking
I, under my
hat,
swam.
WANTED: Un(der)standing Collaborators
June 28, 2009Dear All,
I have been meaning to write sooner. This rain has me pent up reading more of late and thinking about things i need to put on paper. Cole and i have been restless in the rain; thinking about sailing, motoring, rowing, moving around the ocean and how to create the reality we want before reality creates us. Block Island keeps calling as we need to bring work there and visit friends. It’s impossible to plan between our upcoming residency, the boys, Art Walks, teaching an alternative processing class at SMCC, and getting in the studio. Somehow the work will get to BI, but i don’t know if we will actually get a good visit in. Nova Scotia is coming quickly and we are excited to see a place we have never been before. Our curiosity with places and responding to a new landscape will surely spurn some ideas that have yet to be born.
The book i am reading, Diet for a Small Planet, has taken over the Judaic Mysticism book i am halfway through and need to return to Leon. Everything i read these days reminds me of the challenge in making work that promotes a certain spritual/political/personal platform. The idea of having mutually exclusive, and curiously well developed, private and public lives seems to be of utmost import. As my social circle expands here in Portland and i begin to feel the warmth of community after two years on Peaks, it is hard to ignore the undeniable strength in collaboration, in having collaborators.
The question then becomes how to turn valued relationships and collaborations into a means of promoting a sustainable art practice, life and family. Sacrificing one for another seems dramatic and unnecessary at this point in time, especially when we live in a country so full of choices. I am in search of life that empowers other lives, including my own on all scales. Knowingly, this requires collaborating with people who understand. Understand in a way that promotes expansion and vitality. People who understand their own and other’s pursuit of personal interests are not an indulgence of selfishness, but rather a celebration of diversity and a gathering of multiple perspectives leading to a greater understanding of all.
Wallace Stevens
June 13, 2009Two Letters
I
A letter fromEven if there had been a crescent moon
On every cloud-tip over the heavens,
Drenching the evening with crystals’ light,One would have wanted more-more-more-
Some true interior to which to return
A home against one’s self, a darknessAn ease in which to live a moment’s life,
The moment of life’s love and fortune,
Free from everything else, free above all from thought.It would have been like lighting a candle,
Like leaning on the table, shading one’s eyes,
And hearing a tale one wanted intensely to hear,As if we were all seated together again
And one of us spoke and all of us believed
What we heard and the light, though little, was enough.II
A Letter ToShe wanted a holiday
With someone to speak her dulcied native tongue,In the shadows of the wood…
Shadows, woods… and the two of them in speech,In a secrecy of words
Opened out within a secrecy of place,Not having to do with love.
A land would hold her in its arms that dayOr something much like a land.
The circle would no longer be broken but closed.The miles of distance away
From everything would end. It would all meet.
What Photography Offers:
April 23, 2009
Nearby, Tim sat and shivered.
Cole was looking to gather the last of the light.
Gary Snyder – Poet and Bioregionalist
April 16, 2009“Be these things as they may, in Snyder’s work what some of his critics may deem romanticism is balanced by an evident devotion to facts, appreciation of human practicality and capability, expressions of joy found in physical work, interest in science, and continual rumination on responsibility.” Wikipedia – Gary Snyder
Poetry is becoming that much more undeniable in my practice. Through paint and words i search for an understanding — not an answer to a question — a down to earth record of commentary on my place in the world. Perhaps, this is an effort to distinguish my existence or a hope to not fade away quickly in the future. However, it is an impulse i have to record my responses and feelings to places and people. The connection established is re-affirmed in my studio and as time passes by.
Romanticizing or having my work labeled as sentimental is a by-product of focusing on the mannerisms of my subject matter. Gary Snyder is a fine example of a poet who was also cornered (or cornered himself) into a place where this kind of commentary had the tendency to stick to his work. I noted this small part of Snyder’s Wikipedia article as a reminder that sentimentality is simply one part of a larger, more complex feeling when coming to this type of work. In turn, i feel my romantic ideas of place — the place i am in, Peaks Island, islands in general — display a similar entaglement of the joys: wandering and losing your way; appreciation of individual and collective response-ability; the record of blazed trails and gestures devised in effort move through the world; and an interest in questions of direction and divining answers.
Snyder’s work in theories of bioregionalism brings another noteworthy element of his practice into relation with my own. One of the core values of bioregionalism is to dilineate human areas based on the diverse nature of flora, fauna, and georgraphy that create boundried regions based on the organic construction and play between local ecologies. This is different than dividing people based on political maps or city limits etc. The more diverse a locale, the more resilient the ecosystem is to provide for those that dwell in that place over a long period of time.
Diverse techniques used in execution of my observation and response to a place are exampled in my practice — and collaborations with others — to become a bioregional metaphor. Admiring the bioregionalist theory and their specific analysis of place leads me to recognize the similar desire both of our practices have for exalting the diversification of one locale. How this emerges in my work is in the multiple responses i conjure from one local area. Paintings, drawings, photographs, interviews, poems, kits, etc. Each individual creative path loops back in between other paths and creates a tangled way of understanding. This way, this web — this structure — becomes an ecology on its own terms, a practice ever changing, growing, persevering, adapting, and dieing.
Answer these questions clearly or do not pass go:
March 29, 2009WHAT DO I STAND TO LOSE WHEN I EXTRACT MYSELF FROM LOCATING DEVICES?
Ditching certain locating devices, like the closed system operations of GPS or Map Quest or my cell phone i begin to loose my efficiency to operate. The quickness with which i can move through time. I lose sight of an end goal and allow all possible locations near and far to be my end point. I lose my accuracy, i may use all my sensibilities in attempt to foresee my end point but human error weighs on my senses. I become easily lost. But if efficiency, accuracy and and end are not my goals, then i embrace a journey of peaceful meanderings; being affected, wondering, and growing, at all i encounter.
WHAT DO WE GAIN/LOSE IN ENTANGLEMENTS WITH CERTAIN TECHNOLOGIES?
Specifically in using locating devices:
We gain efficiency, directness, facileness, rapidity of motion, time, and accuracy. What we lose are awareness of place; observation or evidence recorded of the journey (moving too fast to stop and do this); A loss of heightened sensations (only noticed when one is moving slowly and takes their time); the injection of the unknown which may help us discover new modes of efficiently moving on our own; We lose confidence in our innate senses and and overall loss of self reliance.
In other words we gain speed and accuracy but loose a larger sense of place and self. By plugging into a thing that is not a part of ourselves, we are allowing something that can be turned on or off to direct our movements. We are pressured to come to an end, to get there quickly and succinctly. This is different than honing our own internal sense of direction, from wandering around gathering information until we find our own way. Being directed or dominated by something outside of ourselves has benefits yet at the cost of loosing our personal internal sensibilities.
Statement
March 9, 2009Sometimes attempting to understand stops one dead in their tracks. It initiates a paralyzing and cyclical thought process that must be injected with considerations from the outside. It is where this impulse to understand hits you, the place that gives one the ability to stand outside in order to see inside more clearly that is of interest to me. I believe it is in becoming connected to the shifting features and patterns of this place that one can better attempt to understand the features and patterns of new understandings. It is the intimate expression that emerges in between these physical and cognitive spaces that shine light on the significance of life.
It is from this new unknown, translated, enhanced, and exotic reality that depicts features of the landscape, which we must now draw meaning from to understand the painting and ourselves. It is through an intimate, non-objective process between painting and painter / painting and viewer that a response-ability and reciprocity within nature emerges and from which understanding may follow.
True Blue Island 