Bookmark 2023

Expectational Hazard

Negative Space

Though this has been posted previously it reminded me of the current House of Representatives.

Expansion

Narrowing is happening everywhere. Disciplines of study look at smaller and smaller areas. Specialties in every field create distance from the big picture by the specific detail they study. People are often narrowing their personal group and guiding ideas. This is possibly a response to fear. Even when we know the news story in all its details, wars, shootings, disease, with every dramatic horror, the media swamps every outlet with endless discussion that generates more fear. We may know the primary characters in the drama, but never who is making money off it other than the media and the arms industry. The way it fits into a larger picture and how a broader understanding might lead to better solutions does not feed the machine, so we are trapped in our chairs, hidden from exposure lest we are somehow fingered as the enemy. The destruction industry is very powerful and is now turning attention to important government structures that though far from perfect have given us a framework to work with competing viewpoints. Facts are at war with alternative facts, our sophisticated brains drowning in simplifying contradictory symbols. Yet creating is still happening. Artists all over the world bring insight and the emotional significance of events. Gaining perspective is a task for images. Antagonisms are built from limiting the evidence, avoiding whatever shows how a different group sees things. We need to see more of how things are interconnected. I recently heard someone on the radio say that banning books was an effort to decrease empathy. Stories create context, allows others into the circumstances behind events. Stories about people different from the familiar group help us understand them better, sympathize with a specific situation and recognize an individual as another human being. Art creates a bridge to the minds of others. Expressed with feeling, the feeling connects people even when the content is unfamiliar. This strengthens the ability to see what matters instead of surface triggers aimed at manipulation. Anyone can train their visual, intuitive intelligence by looking at art. With so much now available on the internet, it couldn’t be easier and more urgent. John Dewey once wrote that propaganda was designed to close minds whereas education was designed to open them. Looking at a bigger picture opens the mind to wider possibilities, opening up solutions that bring together instead of tear apart.

Invitation

Notes on upcoming show

Over forty works covering two floors of the Gallery at Manor Mill, the show “Phases of Mind”, represents two ways I explore feelings I’m trying to understand reflecting diverse mental states. The pastel drawings on the second floor investigate idea-based moods often triggered by my reading in science and philosophy. I think of these drawings as visual philosophy, an image that shows a set of relationships that can prompt ideas in the viewer. One purpose is to break down fixation on separate objects and shift attention to processes of change and interpenetration, drawing attention to impermanence. The graphite-based drawings on the third floor focus on weight, how it affects attention and conveys seriousness. These are darker moods as the metaphor of heaviness implies. Many of them are also motivated by the desire to have the image push out at the viewer rather than the traditional sense of the picture falling back from a window. The seven drawings in the “Rational Limits” series, six of which were shown at the BMA are a bridge to the socio-political work that formed the rest of that show. They consider the mindsets that detach people from their feelings enough to create division and anxiety in the world. In all off these works, the viewer can go in many directions of their own. I’ve sought an essence that gives form that can prompt a viewers’ thought.

Enactment