Title: Manuscript Cartography by Exotic Settlers (original manuscript made into art)

On the Artwork

ON THE ARTWORK - Manuscript Cartography by Exotic Settlers

The splatter paint over the faded pencil asks about the depth of the viewer. The viewer who chooses to go further than the paint enters into the experimental cartographic space where the name for this piece derives. While the content of the writing is obscured by the splatter paint, to view past the paint engages the viewer in multiple art forms as they clash (overlap) and harmonize (reveal new patterns and phrasings).

The choice of blue and green represent the sky and earth, as they are defined by this peculiar impression of their “settlement,” on the page. The sky and earth being part of a “settlement” connotes an entire world being impressed over the original impression on the page (the writing).

While settlement is often perceived as a calculated and technical mark of progress, it is in this sense being re-defined as an improvised chaos of pure human expression through the spontaneous splatter onto the penciled words, which originated on the page independently of any painting idea.

The splatter paint, in effect, embodies the “settler,” and its multi-colored facet further emphasizes its exoticism against the subdued writing.

While both the writing and the paint are part of spontaneous, fully improvised art forms of pure expression, the piece asks to defy the viewer’s preconceived notions of settlers as plain and understood and more; asks who the viewer resonates with, the settler or immediately observable and colorful expression (paint) or the original impression on the page which requires a bit more effort to engage with (writing).

The themes embedded within the paint and the writing, however, are expressed equally spontaneously and share the same space, either harmoniously or not relative to the viewer’s opinion, which aims at not presupposing any superiority between expressions of origination and settlement.

Preamble

PREAMBLE

Exotic Settlers charts the journey of experiencing the naturally transformative process of ending a period of transitional residence, and beginning to live in one place exclusively.

Questions of home, travel and what is foreign are approached creatively through a lens adjusted through self-reflection on these themes, which led to my own "settlement" within, as I have become more permanently resident in a specific place.

The transitional effect lingers psychologically whereby there are character archetypes and features of personal experience, which fade away and leave only a bitter nostalgia in their place, striking as a whiplash wound. This sensation is frequently common to those who stand their ground.

The concepts of the "settler" and normative stereotypes of the "exotic" are placed in abstract, sometimes jarring contexts as to displace fixed notions about any respective moral judgment.

The experimental verse goes through a process of intensified critique on our historic way of life as North American settlers and focuses this critique especially at our notions of the "other."

By the end of the collection, there is neither strict closure nor resolve about a permanent sense of home, only a greater awareness of perspective as it lies sometimes firmly, but mostly without any grasp on any actual "thing" on a ground of experimental, flowing, spontaneous expressions in language.

4 Dreams

African man

Unknown age, possibly in 40s
Unmarried, jobless, refugee
From a civil war, torn country
From the Zaghawa/Bere ethnic group

Genocide.

Victim.

Contemporary colonization
Through culture, art and methodology of peace
Homicidal ontology of absolute despair

The civil question
Night of man
Unfathomable Arabic mysteries

In the bullet eye blood of African societies
Destroyed
In the name of the fasting

Hypocritical, artless God of the survival instinct
Deserted maw of East and North African history
And the pure hand belittled by a pistol

Joyless meeting, religious treason or genetic betrayal
The border past time's wall
Swept against the curb

With dead donkeys and automotive corpses of the industrial European mind
And a pistol
Disarming the crazed, confused Jewish-Arab tongues of Ishmael and Solomon

And the Earth's Abrahamic-African children of prehistoric destiny
A fragment of the human family
Apparent in the trade of hands

Between the opposite living metaphor of a Chinese lover’s cry
Fallen to the ash of the Sudanese war
In the Cleopatra cigarette smile of an immoral, yet necessary fire

Of the mammal skin hearth
Blackened
And booming emotional deities

Hidden in the slightly burned pages of the ongoing conquering
And suicidal rampaging of Mother Earth divine
Yet throughout brotherly and sisterly love prevails

Separation into the unfair glory of a broken now
Embittered jealousy and temptation
From the host of a brewing psychic sickness

Guarding the predawn
Monumental distance among the enchained
Battered souls of a deeply entrenched loss 

Convoluted, exponential falsification of death's human mask 
Still breathing
The attuned words of spiritual greed 

In the crescent boon of a perfect desert sleep
Involved within
An enclosed world all their own

The forgotten beauty of an intoxicating truth
Still relieves the air above with its tempting
Yet out of reach and petrified

Animalistic burden 
Feeding on the glow of the moon
The laughter of pagan lights streaks past the beyond 

In pairs of 3 and 9

We forever move.

In a small hillside village overlooking a lake, east of Puebla, Mexico.
December 6, 2010

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)