Together I sat on the fence.

Why is it that ‘sitting on the fence‘ is so often considered a bad thing? When people talk about someone who is doing so, they often speak with a curl of the lip, a raised eyebrow, a roll of the eyes or a sigh of resignation.

It seems we’re always supposed to draw a conclusion, reach a decision, take a stand or choose a side.

But let’s face it, from the top of a fence you can see the horizon in all directions. You get a good overview of all the fields or gardens within viewing distance. Jump off that fence, and part of your view is obscured.

One of my favourite poems is by Michael Leunig:

Come sit down beside me, I said to myself.
And although it doesn’t make sense,
I held my own hand as a small sign of trust
And together I sat on the fence.

To me, this speaks volumes about the inner confusion and division that can happen when we’re trying to resolve two (or more) ways of seeing or being in the world. But it also speaks about a need to trust the process.

Not everything has to be an either/or issue and we don’t always have to resolve every division. It’s ok to ‘hold our own hands as a small sign of trust’ and stay right where we are – sitting on the fence. It’s a great spot from which to scan the horizon for those elusive both/and ideas.

Villanelle For Our Time

From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.
This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.

~ Leonard Cohen

Cosmic Embroidery

Exploring the works of Japanese born, Canadian based visual artist, Takashi Iwasaki. Working across multiple media, Takashi explores colour and depicts abstract scenes from his internal landscape. 

Embroidery:

Painting:

Naked Girl and Mirror

This is not I. I had no body once-
only what served my need to laugh and run
and stare at stars and tentatively dance
on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun.
Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone
on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown.
Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?

I stare at you in fear, dark brimming eyes.
Why do you watch me with that immoderate plea-
'Look under these curled lashes, recognize
that you were always here; know me-be me.
'Smooth once-hermaphrodite shoulders, too tenderly
your long slope runs, above those sudden shy
curves furred with light that spring below your space.

No, I have been betrayed. If I had known
that this girl waited between a year and a year,
I'd not have chosen her bough to dance upon.
Betrayed, by that little darkness here, and here
this swelling softness and that frightened stare
from eyes I will not answer; shut out here
from my own self, by its new body's grace-

for I am betrayed by someone lovely. Yes,
I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl.
Your lips in the mirror tremble as I refuse
to know or claim you. Let me go-let me be gone.
You are half of some other who may never come.
Why should I tend you? You are not my own;
you seek that other-he will be your home.

Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears;
I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey.
Some day we may love. I may miss your going, some day,
though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years.
Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too,
if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.


~ Judith Wright

Introspection by Harpreet Khara

Reflection of Self

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier ventured into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she ultimately left over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian further indulged in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Maier’s secret body of work came to light in 2007 when a locker containing a massive hoard of her negatives was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. 

Renowned for her work capturing the spontaneity of street scenes, Vivian Maier was also an avid self-portraitist. She quite literally reflected herself in many of her works. Was she pioneering the modern-day "Selfie"? 

Faces in the Mob

Korean artist KwangHo Shin recently made a colorful splash in the art world when he mysteriously posted his portfolio online, and little else. The young artist is based out of Yeongdeok, South Korea and studied art at Keimyung University. His work primarily focuses on people and their emotions, portrayed largely through abstract strokes of paint. What often pops through his wildly moving colors, are his subject’s expressive eyes.

Chorelation

Everytime I see a group of people in dark clothing and masks I immediately think Eyes Wide Shut, don't you?  

The fantastic, mass-oriented, fine art photography of Claudia Rogge really takes me there. The German photographer shoots individual subjects, and then digitally arranges them to create a sense of mass participation and performance. Here are a few of her most striking images.

The Night Ride

Gas flaring on the yellow platform; voices running up and down;
Milk-tins in cold dented silver; half-awake I stare,
Pull up the blind, blink out - all sounds are drugged;
the slow blowing of passengers asleep;
engines yawning; water in heavy drips;
Black, sinister travellers, lumbering up the station,
one moment in the window, hooked over bags;
hurrying, unknown faces - boxes with strange labels - 
all groping clumsily to mysterious ends,
out of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates,
their echoes die. The dark train shakes and plunges;
bells cry out, the night-ride starts again.
Soon I shall look out into nothing but blackness,
pale, windy fields, the old roar and knock of the rails
melts in dull fury. Pull down the blind. Sleep. Sleep
Nothing but grey, rushing rivers of bush outside.
Gaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.

~ Kenneth Slessor

Dangerously close to nothing

Exploring the works of one of my favorite photographers, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981).

"More than thirty years ago, Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from the window of a Lower East Side Manhattan loft. A photographer, she was prodigious and original; she had been a star pupil at the Rhode Island School of Design and a contemporary of the Surrealists in Rome. She left behind 800 negatives and 120 published images, which later would multiply into nearly 500 and comprise one of the most stunning— and studied—oeuvres in American photography.

She was 22 years old when she died.

Woodman, like Sylvia Plath, is inseparable from her suicide. She disappeared into her fragmentary,
hallucinatory, black-and-white (but seemingly all grey) images, which were mostly of her (mostly nude) self, but never of her whole self. Something, often her face, was always obscured: by a shard of paper, a cloud of hair, a wing of light… She used long exposures to capture objects that were no longer there, or maybe never were.

Even in the “real” world, she was never fully present. She did not relate to the contemporary moment, loved mostly Victorian or Gothic literature, wore only vintage clothing and could not even pretend to understand pop culture. She has been called a feminist, but she was not political or aware enough to be a feminist, and felt guilty about it; her best friend said so, and also that she had the most intense girl crushes. She loved women, although she was ambivalent about being one of them. She was infatuated with the writer Gertrude Stein and obsessed with the photographer Deborah Turbeville, whose work—along with Duane Michals’ and Miroslav Tichy’s—most directly precedes (and now seems to echo) Woodman’s.

“The subject of her self-portraiture,” writes Chris Townsend in the definitive 2006 Phaidon monograph Francesca Woodman, “is provisional and contingent, losing itself at the very moment that it is defined.” Had she stayed alive, the chance that she would have become a prominent figure in the art world is small. She was not like Cindy Sherman, the great self-portraitist; Sherman was pop-savvy and posed safely in costume, never truly naked or vulnerable or afraid. Woodman liked to dress up, but she could never be anything more than herself and, in fact, she appeared to be less—sometimes much less, dangerously close to nothing.

The ending is unhappy, but how could she have lived? Her talent and her capacity for seeing was so
extraordinarily bright that she herself felt only a shadow of it."

This is an extract from an article written by Sarah Nicole Prickett, posted on January 19, 2011 at 11:23 am for Dossier Journal.