Monthly Archives: September 2016

Liberty Denied Opens at the Museum of Culture & Environment!

I’m so excited to be showing with a great group of artists at the Museum of Culture & Environment, Central Washington University.

Liberty Denied: Immigration, Detention, Deportation collects work that explores the challenges experienced by immigrants, with a focus on the Pacific Northwest.

An opening reception is planned for September 29 at 5:30pm. The show runs through December 10th.

The Museum of Culture & Environment at CWU is located at Dean Hall, 1200 Wildcat Way, Ellensburg, WA.

The Museum is open Wednesday-friday from 11am-4pm, and Saturday from 10am-3pm.

After 9/11 and Chapter 2 of Migrations: Parinamavada

9/11 always takes the wind out of my sails. It boggles my mind a whole generation has only known this country at war. I’ve been painting but otherwise coiled into my inner corners like a closed box.

Here is the beginning of Chapter 2 of the Migrations Journal. Titled Parinamavada, it’s all about the numinous border between the outside and inside of the body– our senses. The ultimate infiltrations, the outer entering our inner self.

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The poetry here is mine, and begins with musings over the immaterial senses.

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This question about whether perception is passive or active is highly significant. The observer’s effect in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is not just an aberration of quantum physics.

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It’s true we don’t inhabit the quantum field. We move about and occupy an Einsteinian universe, but tell me you’re behavior doesn’t respond to the gaze of a hostile party if you’re an undocumented immigrant, or person of color, or LGBTQIA? Yeah, the observer’s effect is quite palpable in this universe.

Where is my consciousness, in my mind, my heart, my digestive system? Is it in the fabric of my community, is it an aggregate response to my perceptions and yours?

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That uncertainty again…if reality and memory shift, where is that border?

The Art Museum Is My New Cathedral: More Meditations From The Migrations Journal

Here’s hoping you had a fun Labor Day! Here are the last four double page spreads in chapter 1 of the Migrations Journal. Stay tuned, chapter two is next!

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Years ago I rescued an art encyclopedia from certain recycling. Bits and pieces of its pages end up in prints and sketchbooks. Here, one of these pages serves a fun and (secret) bit of self-reflection. After all, encyclopedias and art archives are “astonishing Human arrangements” in their own right!

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Of course, unlike Milosz, my cathedral is not a church. And the prayers I preserve have more to do with the art museum and art center than anything else.

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I love to sketch hands from paintings and sculptures on display in museum collections. I feel they reach out to us in a kind of frozen urgency, pointing and pivoting so that we too can follow in that endless procession that began when our most ancient ancestors plastered their hands on a cave wall.

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Isn’t art or creative expression, whatever form it takes, a borderline between our minds and flesh? That’s our meeting place, where thought is transmitted through the senses.

And that’s where we’ll meet next, in chapter two.