17 March to 17 April 2010

Silverlens Galleries, Manila

 

all images are the property of the artist

1-2 cardboard mounted on panel, approximately 96 x 96 inches

3 oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches

4-5 felt and epoxy, size variable, (3 boats, approximately 6 x 6 feet each)

6 oil on canvas, approximately  88 x 88 inches

Thousandsofmilesaway, 2009 & 2010

Dear Sweet Filthy World,

You’re punishing us, or so they say.  Never the mind since I have yet to see it myself, this utter disaster that washes everything away only to flood others’ memories with things they would like to forget.

Once you have waded through the rivers, is your old self washed away?  And what is left, is it the new?  Or perhaps what is left is simply a shell, a ghost in a laundered city?

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 
I lift my lids and all is born again.
  (I think I made you up inside my head.)*

Embrace me in my anguish. Put seaweed in my hair and vow that you won’t cry.  Because I’ve gone, I can’t go on, I can’t go on, I can’t go on.**

I try to grasp an experience from the hazy bits and bites that stream in palm-sized moving images, but framed by the monitor, it is limited 13.5 inches to my desk and I fail. How do you form memories when they’re not your own?  How do you recall a disaster you never experienced?  And when the heaviness of the air from a thousand long exhales starts to descend, must I join the chorus?

I am so remote from “that”, and from “that”, that I am likely to simply look through another’s witnessed images and comment on composition and color.  Great picture!, I say.  In my head, all things tide and ebb more incredibly than reportage.  Odd debris fly out into the air and crash.  Houses sink into the earth and dredge up filth that cling to boats as they pass.  A grey garden grows with monstrous topiaries everything covered in muck:  words, books, windows, cars, caves, art, design, truth, lies all camouflaged in fear and trembling.

I open my eyes and the doom and bloom disappear.  My one sweet, filthy memory shatter into a thousand gasps of air all covered in (sniff) muck.

I can’t go on I can’t go on I can’t go on. I must close now.**

From, Artist

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* From Mad Girl’s Love Song, by Sylvia Plath

**From Dear Sweet Filthy World, by Elvis Costello