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.

they, a chalk-grafted many


disturbance fed through wires
bled to speed by enchanting music
brewing up fires in words
that Act in sound
a music
from the Lost Continent,
dark with parallel bridges
out from Earth itself

waving in havoc and crazed dismemberment
forlorn family mores
close or distant
move to swell the universal core
in sound frequencies
meaning birth
to the fatigued
in greedy, sleep factory Calgary
swearing on winter to arrive with a cyclical heat
a passion for birthing truth in being
or swaying southwards to move
with feet striding along the sun-touched rocks and swirling banks
abruptly here
with a soundless unforgiving beauty
tossing and turning

gargantuan smoked fish 
herds into alcoholic sheep
in the reed-bank craze
unknown, mystic
few and unborn
waving manic in the soundscape vents
crawling with vermin and insecticide
neat and discovering, the lanky growl
smothering "its her hour"

whose treated throat went inert
for the vertical tingling rush
each animalistic gruff, licked
on the back and talon-stuck launch
taking each pierced failure into the dirge and sounding gross
sirens crafted from jeweled hands and wilderness jails
the ghost house, wherein torture presumes the un-hailed

they, a chalk-grafted many
whose lives ride sickly and frail over the increasing open
linger
& savor purpose
to connect with their predecessors

boons strike on gongs
rescinding into the abysmal fact
a drunk voracious inertia within
gives into a serrated pledge
freezing love's drift over the valiant plains 
wanderer navigating through bursts of fire 
while swans pull in whispers from far off
sinking whistles, incantations, coded and brief
releasing and subsuming the night
to walk alongside other creatures
whose origins have no life in this world
ranging across times and spaces
in the vast maze, within perceived eyes
following a vigor
sensing hues and grays 
figuring, vanishing
erased across slick thought trains
to appease the spirit of the land and renew Place

raised from pure desire into a high peacedom
prevailing and spanning beyond Earth
yet encircling the buried heights
now wasted underneath urban pathways
leading to vanquished lore
spun with vines 
growing and curling
swift with a fluidity of inhuman passion
to embrace and devour flowering tombs

gathering in the Name
speaking in raw emotion
devotees to spontaneity alive with independent, rousing energy
gaining followers behind faint lines written in dust 
saved in the memories and the trust of trickster cults

after every midnight round
to oust the villainous government
from outside neoclassical churches and new age rooms
cast in a shrouded light
that spawns frustrated, annoyed intellect
to gulp down dreams and swallow potion

creating truth from loneliness
in a voice to pierce the resounding street noise
lurching into trapped rooms cultivating family
in the one heart calm
shining, grateful and instigating sweet surprise
in the original blessing, who arrived in disguise
a disease most awful and drawing all life into its wake
a tide greater than the lunar kiss over twilit tunes
aspiring to ring clear in the heavens with wide-eyed yearning
to be purged from a milky strain in daily visions

gaining a home
to bring life to its earliest fruition in the morning
excited and aroused
with first sensations in deep conscious meaning
never astray, constant as eternal polar night
ravaging the helldoms
with rightful heirs to their prosperous thrones
blanketing their hearts
from each beat and eye
from each twitch
to forego the bland and sappy thrust into a virgin's song
with morbid taste in wooing her fictitious bed

a homeless innocence
neverending childhood freedom
to think and act through beliefs that seemed real enough to be
identifying with the same fire in the sky
as the male absence of pain, to become that one
that never was
and created, could be...

February 8, 2011
Contemplating mass vibrations penetrating thought in Chinatown Calgary apartment

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