Present Present: Key Word

Ultimately there are infinite ways of accessing our given worlds. Still, each of us must choose a cipher to the puzzlement of individual perception and the transposition of thought back onto our external Realities.

As a means of uncovering uncovering, our key determines not how we look at things but how we look through them and into the present moment. 

The identification of seven separate key words transcended the chance encounter of seven individuals in a classroom many years ago to reveal our cohered constitutional root, nurtured by seven conditions of humanness, each a tributary to a mutually shared sense of the nature of being.

From the ashes of Reality

A new order is born.

What was given

lives again.

From the death of an image

A new one comes alive.

In our impermanent life

we continue to be.

We are:

We will be again.

This work is conceived in response to the destruction of Red Screen, a photograph irreparably faded and damaged. I regard it as a metaphor for our impermanent life and the transitional forms that express our being and identity. 

From the remains of this work, the detail of a timelessly ever-expanding pattern, a new image is generated and transformed into an unpredictable one. Now the dead image, recreated anew, lives its temporal life, momentarily fixed in one of its multiple configurations. Eventually, it will dissolve again in regenerated forms, born again in our lifetime of endless change: a free choice in the irrefutable chance of Reality.

Leah Poller

E= Me2

Mixed media (wood, metal, plastic, chain, film, tape, beads, glass, twigs)

2021

Key Word: CONSCIOUS

I vividly remember at 30 coming to a fork in the road and taking it.  The panel/support for this artwork has traveled around the world at least 4 times. Myself, as many and more. The qualia became my compass whose whirly-gig polar star sizzled with energy to catapult my being into more all, more everything.  The world came into existence, for me, by me.  I developed  a muscled imagination willing to hand-wrestle my aesthetic concerns from liquid to molten, to hardened,  to immutable as I tangled and untangled my ‘world knot” in a dance-like ritual. In some things, my steps have become deliberate. In others, the mystery suffices to send me careening on a sensual joy ride where process provides pathways, alive-ness opens the eyes and heart, and my ticket says ‘one-way’. As for all the rest, in maternal wisdom, “whatever” unlocks all doors. 

Today a bird fell from the sky onto my terrace table. My sadness knew no limits.

Rick Raymond

Oneness

2021

Key Word: ONENESS

The perception of oneness is a unifying essence of the material, spirit and soul, in which the ‘one’ is found in the ‘all’ and the ‘all’ exists in the ‘one’.  It is the whole and the indivisible, within changeless time and space.

From the field of life … it is a search for the ephemeral and ineffable.

I sense this oneness in nature – where a universal energy flows. Morning birds and evening owls, and in the sounds of geese overhead. The blue of the sky. And the winds that stroke my skin.

It is in our song and laughter, and the spirit that shines in our eyes. In our breath and in our tears. In our hopes, fears and pains. In our uncertainty. In our troubles and sorrows. In our love and desires. And in our life regenerated.

Lisa di Donato

Untitled (self-portrait II)

Tintype, 5” x 7”

2021

Key Word: LIMINALITY

Abstraction is a liminal ritual undertaken not to withdraw but as the transfiguration and extension of body and mind through the unfolding of self-relations. It is a return to origins, with the experience of the activity itself being the origin. 

Like all other materials and subjects of my work, I approach myself as a site of potentialities to be continually transformed into actualities. Gestures of an Eros of thought that seeks with the openness of desire, but only knows jouissance of the morphing of being and its self-enjoyment of becoming, the intimacy of learning what it is to itself.

A soft crevasse is where my thoughts recoil to, a point of orientation representing both the structure and anti-structure of being. It is the darkness of the unknown in which to disengage in order to engage and be experienced. 

Judith Lipton

Hudson River

Charcoal on BFK paper, 31.5” x 47”

2021

Key Word: TOMORROW

Tomorrow, a word that has five consonants, a word that has gravitas. Tomorrow, a word that has significance for my daily encounters with the world. You see, I tend to put things off for tomorrow, and then suffer the consequences of last-minute obligations. As an artist do I need to live in a state of anxiety? Yesterday, today, tomorrow seem to flow like the river I am obsessed with drawing. The eternal current in the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I always come to the river at high tide , my river, the Hudson River. At high tide the river is in full glory as the waves come towards me, away from me in an eternal flow out of my control. It is this element of control which I momentarily feel I can hold when I seek tomorrow. The river tells me to go with my flow and breathe with acceptance.

Farah Marie Velten

Nostalgia for the Ephemeral

C-print, 10.5” x 15.5”

2021

Key Word: EPHEMERAL

The ephemeral reminds us of the necessity of death in life and when experiencing this inevitability in the natural world possibly we are the closest we can get to the present, allowing a release from holding on to the past and contemplating the future. In these often brief states of awe in this heightened awareness we might feel connected as the living dying portals we are, and in this collective engagement perhaps time can be stretched into a vast space switching from the “I” to “we”.  
Nostalgia for the Ephemeral offers the ephemeral state of both the dying flower and of its record, locked between exposure and permanence; a fleeting work which only exists for an instant in time and space, pushing the challenge of seeing to a transitional realm which echoes the condition of the human experience as changing beings passing through this moment in time we call life.