I am now privileged with the opportunity to exhibit this photographic series next year at Carroll University's Rowe Art Gallery. Bringing this photographic series into an academic setting like Carroll University has been a goal of mine since creating this work in 2009. A university gallery is the perfect setting for this series which draws on so many different creative elements allowing for departmental collaboration with potential assignments and important dialog. I am interested in developing another dialog through my blog by creating some new visual interpretations from book passages submitted here on my blog, by you. Unlike the first process in which I took the passages in the order they were received, I plan to choose a small selection from those submitted to include in the exhibit next October 2012.
Post your brief book passage below, include the title of the book and author. If I select your passage for a visual interpretation you will receive a print of my finished interpretation.
As stated by a Milwaukee Art Professor, The idea behind this body of work is the collaborative connection between
me and the person who selects the passage of writing and the original passage itself. A three way triangle. One person
sees and writes, one person reads and relates and an artist brings to light an idea of what the vision is. What do these
diverse connections tell the viewer about the nature of perception and life? The essence of this project is the
complexity of human communication. The beauty of this project is deeper and richer than just the pictures. It's in the
way that we each communicate our idea's and emotions to each other and try to understand how this world works.
It is ever changing and ever reinterpreted. As the artist, I became the interpreter and the director.
Zu... Except for most of what Shakespeare wrote, I've long considered my favorite book to be Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Two quotes.
ReplyDelete“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
And...
There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”
Rue + Didier: A Sobering Love Story
ReplyDeleteA Novel by Carrie Ann Seymour
Prelude:
Halloween 2011. I'm sitting on my bed in the dark, shaking, sweating, and praying for forgiveness. I cry out to G-d. Please G-d, forgive me. I can't live like this anymore. I have been in a state of inebriation twelve hours out of everyday for the past two years. I make excuses for it. My life is stressful. I'm afraid. I fear having my own thoughts. Thoughts that tell me to leave, to run. I am afraid. I don't want to think at all about the things I've done, or think I've done in my past. The mistakes and missteps I've taken. The shame. The regret.
Sometimes I think my name was a curse passed down from a wicked great grandmother witch. “You will rue the day you ever brought a child into this world,” she'd hurled at my mother. Poor girl of 18. Widow by 19. And so my name became Rue. Filled with regret and longing, and a full blown alcohol problem by the age of fourteen.
I plead with G-d, “I promise to be better. I promise that I will go to an AA meeting in the morning. Please just get me through this night. Please, G-d. Just get me through the night.”
Day One:
I try to sleep and images of Francis Bacon's portraits eating eachother's faces fill my mind. I tell them stop. I tell them they are not welcome. They eat. Cannibals. Abstract, starving cannibals. They feed on eachother's twisted faces. Their mouth's open caverns filled with craving and want beyond want. Greed.
I try to open my eyes and they are glued shut against the lightening sky. Today is the day. I roll over and grab a cigarette from the bed side table. I search for the lighter and find it shoved between the wall and the mattress. The light blinds me temporarily, and I inhale the sickly sweet smoke and cough. I stab out the cigarette into the ceramic ashtray I made in high school on the floor next to the bed. My hand grazes a half empty can of warm, stale beer left over from the night before. I shudder. I want it. I swing my feet to the floor and tiptoe the can into the kitchen and pour its golden piss colored contents onto the pile of dishes stacked as high as my hairline. My hands are not quite steady. A light sweat has broken out on my forehead and upper lip. I tremble. I long.
All the voices flood back. You can't. You won't. You don't even want to. But the voices are wrong. I am ready.
I stink of stale cigarettes and alcohol. I don't remember everything about yesterday, but I do remember calling a “friend” I hadn't spoken to in months and screamed at her to call me a cab. I remember calling my neighbor and telling him I needed help.
“Help yourself. I have my own problems to deal with.” Click.
I remember calling my shrink and not telling her I was drunk.
“At least you didn't call your Mother. You are making progress. I will see you in two weeks.” Click
I cannot take a shower. I find clean-ish clothes under the bed and slip them on. I hide my hair under a black shore-man’s cap. I brush my teeth and gargle, missing the taste of beer mingled with morning breath. I put on lip gloss. My hands are not quite steady. I take a pill, Doctor prescribed for anxiety, I take another pill. It takes me at least fifteen minutes to calm down. I take a breath. I take another breath, deeper and know that I made a promise. I know what has to be done. I promise to be better.
~Tina (C.M. DeSpears)
ReplyDelete1.) “Something warm and serene hovered around me, separating me, waking memories of something that had once existed, I knew not when or where, but it had, and I had no need to revive it. It was vibrant, strong, and precious as it had once been, like it had never been, shapeless and therefore all-encompassing. I knew it had existed, maybe in my childhood, which no longer remained in my memory but rather in my grief, maybe in my desire that it become and be, translucent, weightless, like a soft movement, like the silent flow of water, like the silent rush of blood, like sunny joy at nothing. And I knew that it was sin, the absorption in prayer, the delight of the body and mind, but I could not tear myself away, I did not want end this peculiar oblivion.
But then it ended on its own.”
Death and the Dervish / Mesa Selimovic
2.) “The moonlight shone frail and silken, and the tombstones in the graveyards gleamed warmly white. Broken night whispered between the houses as young people moved excitedly in the streets and courtyards. Giggling, a distant song, and murmurs were heard, and it seemed that on this Saint George’s Eve the whole kasaba* trembled in fever. Suddenly, for no reason, I felt separated from all of it. Fear crept into me unnoticed, and everything around me began to acquire strange proportions--the people and their movements, the kasaba itself no longer seemed familiar. I had never seen them like this before, I had not known that the world could become so disfigured in a day, in an hour, in a moment—as if some demon’s blood had begun to boil and no one could calm it. I saw townspeople in couples, heard them, they were behind every fence, every gate, every wall. Their laughter, talk, and glances were not like on other days; their voices were muffled and heavy. A scream cut through the darkness, like lightning in an impending storm. The air was permeated with sin, the night full of it. On this night witches would fly cackling above rooftops wet with the milk of the moonlight, and no one would retain his senses. People would burn with passion and fury, with madness and the need to destroy themselves, all of them in a single moment—where would I turn then?”
Death and the Dervish / Mesa Selimovic
Kasaba—Provincial town in the Ottoman Empire
3.) The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones near under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them and heed.
The Company of Wolves / Angela Carter
Send via email by Patricia,
ReplyDeleteDan Woodrell's Tomato Red...page 73-74. He wrote Winter's Bone, and has a way of writing so articulately and no-nonsense and beautifully about really pretty ugly things.
"Jam's got her head hung low and is moaning and has steam shootin' from her ears. When she spoke she sounded like she might break down bawling. "God damn," she says, "you know, that big rotten gap between who I am, and who I want to be, never does quit hurtin' to stare across.""