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.

you are as a message


"you are as a message,
complete

full with clarity
goodness in substance,

as a sleeping vessel
purified constantly

with the freshest oxygen, pure
gifted from the high spiritual life force

known in the most ancient virgin forests,
an ecosystem wise with earthly pleasure,

swaying to magic rhythms
bending your heart

scaling every obstacle materialized by mortal touch,
miraculous and soothing, not tempting but calm,

an emergent glow
breaking the great fever

healing modern man, delirious with repeated history,
your very being is the cure and every expression a sacred step

bringing us closer
a shared peace

among all humanity and all universal creation,
uniting through creative spark,

an engine
lit with raw organic nourishment

enough to bust its industrial shell and return biological trust
to our mammalian birth rite,

in trust with the conscious plant,
to break through the elegant mind into an artistic foray

bespeaking bucolic prehistory
formed within intrinsic spiritual awareness

behind natural phenomena,
personal masks betray being

into all-encompassing, non-manufactured and priceless oneness
throughout all creation,

echoing softly
abounding in the mirrored reflection

trailing speechless in the wake and path
leading human beings,

diversity, living and interconnected,
seeds

poetic with animate light,
dancing atop materialized consciousness

with a tongue shattered by disbelief
over the glass ocean's delicate ecological presence,

stirring fear and awe in the innocent play
calling rural existence into the fall

from forbidden tastes and sexual waste,
energetic flow

mastered in union with the reciprocal goddess
hunting and escaping at once

in cyclical waters that pour sacrificial rain
into the burning sun's mouth,

opened wide to receive that message now
condensed to wood, intellect and meaning,

a transformed viscera
experience cast into the naked shadows

waning in the moment
thinking drums urge to press

contemporary passes along religious mores and scientific equations
growing careless with matrimonial power

over the alchemist's bronze and wooden desk,
in Europe's deep blue-eyed, dark-haired imagination, mixed

blessed a beggar's blood and drank the prophet's wave
to intoxication

over ritually burdened tables
bending over with familial obligation

to the twin sibling deities
groaning and slaying to extinction within their wronged bowels

to sever the final connection to an inverted spirit,
lawless and foaming with rebellious vigils

to other gods across oceans,
forgetting immediate love"

February 22, 2011
Moving into the first place together with my Love in Chinatown Calgary

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