Quick notes

Quick notes to self:

Hopefully, I'll be able to process a bunch of stuff I just learned about parts of the brain that I didn't know that I had and write an intelligent blog entry about it. But in the meantime, since I've got to leave for class soon, I'll just note some interesting links.

A link from Wood s lot has turned up a great issue from 2000 of the Janus Head Review, Regarding a Critical Rhetoric. There's just too much great stuff in there to talk about right now, including rhetoric and dreams, not to mention stuff about psychology and rhetoric. Great idea generating stuff.

I strongly recommend the new exhibition at Photo-eye of the works of Elijah Gowin. I was quite impressed both by the photographs, and the issues he brings up in his statements:

Artist Statement

Raised in the North by Southern parents, I have always considered my Southern roots to provide a true sense of home and place. A slice of family land in Virginia, guarded by stories of relatives long dead, provides me with a feeling of belonging. Yet this landscape of thick, tangled underbrush is restricting as well as comforting. My acute awareness of place thus involves both a closeness and separateness from these surroundings. Flannery O’Connor felt a similar polarity in her relationship to her home in Georgia when she said "To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world." Often separated from this region, I have been able to clarify my interest in thinking of place as an artistic influence.


Process Statement

In this body of work, titled Hymnal of Dreams, I am presenting a new set of constructions, rituals and characters based upon history and personal experiences of the South. Often narrative, these images present some question, and show the struggle for resolution. This constructed landscape, although arising from the past is about searching for meaning in the present. How we handle, arrange, and value objects and archetypes reflects our contemporary state of mind.

Both assertions are very close to my own praxis. The only problem I have is with the "struggle for resolution." I don't think that most things can be resolved. They can only be handled, arranged, and valued. However, his notation of the "paradox of place" is something that I've been wrestling with in these pages myself. There's more to expand here as well.

It's all about the present. Bringing things together into an acceptance of consciousness as we can know it. Augustine was on about that a lot too. Geez, I think too much, but I love it!