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.

rare & genuine


all shared moments, with her, so
rare & genuine
where time becomes palpable

an instant, as true as conception leading to birth
the infant in embrace, no longer a figment
desire or imagined name

touching lightly across the palm, reading you
seeing your insides grow bold and scintillate
to inspire being awake in the moment's only time

a brush across the single pathway, a bridge over frozen rivers
and the soft glowing silence of the full moon
speaks to a glory, that instance, so

rare, genuine, yet
feeble, and emotionally down-pouring 
within

to beckon suicidal dramaturgy
a sacrificial patience
to imagine
the melted being, physical merging
with flowing subzero waters

turbulent for slight, opened spaces where Sun marked her way
and provided an opening into one Sun-ray
still fashioning Earth as a living creature

embracing death between two chaotic warring arms
that feeling 
a numbness, serene and unforgiving

an imaginary depth, dropping my body into death's dream 
through naturally engraved aquatic pores

a doorway into the underworld
final 

decision

yet a prayer walk raises the spirit upwards
with each step towards home

to gift gentle words and long chest-to-chest
heart beating intimacy, so pure
rare & genuine

moments true with timeless frailty
yet when alone disintegrate
into the aftermath of some unknown future 
past or forgotten

energy, writhing though
willingly fed

keeping an eye on the livid skull
rash reddening in the freezing
off-white, grazed streets, whose ice deeply penetrates 
invisibly into the all-conscious smile

freeing human body's commotion
to finger into my pocket, and return to the indoor apartment air
with a peace of mind

a parallel lunar escape, stretching my heart
from Mexico's airflow nipple

and I, the wailing newborn, cast away
into the diligent fold of an individual blanket
held quaking by the bleeding mother

who's womb, empty
trails off with healing light
into the soundscape afternoon 

and needing to be heard
the shine blinks with wonder 

fifty centavos worth for the traveling sign 
leading nowhere, to nobody

a formless demigod crashes through mental fixations 
on mythologues and poetic visions into the ever deeper

spiraling tendencies to imbibe entheogenic heights
impressing volatile wire designs onto the discolored, skin-flushed brilliance 

exhaling rainbow Sundays 
across the North American plains, and so reasoning
in toxic smoke

machine-blushed faces cope with the inhospitable skies
drowning in the faded existential ruins
cursed and plagued

while the few resuscitate the ground's lush
unfailing veins 
an optimistic growth envelops human society

drumming circular tensions over communication pyres
electronic magnet watch telephones
knowing every name, place and shame

naked with meaning
to meet another over priceless magazine conversation 
and coffee bookshop strolls

fantasizing grotesque economies
with drill-locked jaws coming to a head
and shattering 

aimless into each wine glass foment
while the Western Hero spaces out and feels
neglected

buying time.
and led
we find why, with collective taste

persuade need to extend a hand 
not escaping, immersed
wildly

in random acts of kindness
that emerge
as the human brain sticks to computer screens
and reason turns sour 

with culturally misappropriated wisdom
vandalized trust subsumes the European Nation-State fiction
and the world burns in a euphemism of greed and anxiety

wasted all at once under the crooked thumb of American TV
blamed by the underbelly of Orion
constellations fall apart under the unseemly guise of the Deified Visionary 
inside each un-hatched, flowering being

learning suddenly
through a progress stunted by research and commerce

worlds slowly form
deliberate & sound
with resonance 
boundless

scaling the skeletal structure, inwardly 
housed with an honesty to study deeply 
our relations, mixtures and voids

profoundly empty, yet
potent and with sure steps
a foundation, on which to Love 

between the speechless universe
a mold, created and destroyed, balanced and perfected
known through a dissemination

flown to the ten thousand directions
by an anonymous author

spontaneous mastery, always falling
multitudes' sinking vessels

round the last leg
towards a pathless sojourning
rare & genuine

March 22, 2011
Chinatown Calgary

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