© 2021 Hector Viveros Lee |
Happy Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola. In gratitude for the Society of Jesus! AMDG
My friend, Yumiko, told me of the TeamLab show at the Asian Art Museum. Using present technology, TeamLab is known for using darkened rooms with walls and mirrors to create immersive environments of natural elements that move and grow on projected on the walls and floors. TeamLab is an art collective of artists, engineers, programmers, animators and architects from Tokyo, Japan. They create borderless digital artwork using advance technology.
In the Continuity show at the Asian Art Museum, the spaces were filled with butterflies, flowers, fishes, crows and organic plant forms. Inadvertently Yoriko and I discovered that the fish responded to our hands in one particular room and butterflies died when we shook our hands at swarms of butterflies. In another room, a participant waved her hand over a moving organic branch that responded by changing colors. The work reminded me of a communal Yayoi Kusama infinity room.
TeamLab plays with the planar concept in two-dimensional art from an East Asian perspective, that does not recognize the border between the viewer’s body in the world of the painting. In Western art, two-dimensional art has traditionally viewed as a window into another world. In the exhibition, they explore this spatial structure: creating artwork space in three dimensions on a computer to render the space in two dimensions without creating the border between the viewer’s body and the artwork. They call this construction “ultrasubjectvie space,” which appears as a video display and projection in the work, and does not became a boundary and is continuous with the viewers space in which the viewer’s body is present.
We settled in one carpeted room with sloping walls we settled on the ground and the audience was immersed in an enclosed space of fish, stars, crows and butterflies. Only the ceiling was unadorned. It was an impressive exhibit nonetheless. The space was filled with participants filming the experience and talking selfies, a present de rigueur custom of documentation. phenomenon, the exhibit shows how technology is expanding our understanding of art and how positively people are responding to it when traditional museum spaces.
Submission
"The Birth of the Pearl" by Albert Pierre Maignan by (1896)
By William Cowper
O Lord, my best desire fulfill,
And help me to resign
Life, health, and comfort to Thy will,
And make Thy pleasure mine.
Why would I shrink at Thy command,
Whose love forbids my fears?
Or tremble at the gracious hand
That wipes away my tears?
No, rather let me freely yield
What most I prize to Thee;
Who never hast a good withheld,
Or wilt withhold, from me.
Thy favor, all my journey through,
Thou art engaged to grant;
What else I want, or think I do,
'Tis better still to want.
Wisdom and mercy guide my way,
Shall I resist them both?
A poor blind creature of day,
And crush'd before the moth!
But ah! my inward spirit cries,
Still binds me to Thy sway;
Else the next cloud that veils the skies
Drives all these thoughts away.
© |
Solitude
by Caroline Caddy
It’s something they carry with them
– explorers night shifts seamen –
like a good pair of binoculars
or a camera case
perfectly and deeply compartmented.
It has a quiet patina
that both absorbs and reflects
like a valuable instrument
you have to sign for
– contract with alone –
and at the end of the voyage
you get to keep.
Sometimes it’s very far away.
Sometimes so close
at first you think the person next to you
is picking up putting down
a personal cup
a book in another language
before you realise what
– when talk has moved off
leaning its arms
on someone else’s table –
is being
handed to you.
Having been introduced to Noah Purfoy’s inprovisational art in everyday and cast away objects, by my godson Francis Gonzales, I asked if he was familiar with Gee Bend’s quilts, where improvisation of available materials is part of the charm of the pieces. He was. So we made a trek to BAMPFA to see an retrospective exhibition by Rosie Lee Thompkins, an artist from Richmond, California.
Rosie Lee Thompkins—a pseudonym adopted by Effie Mae Howard—is recognized as an accomplished and inventive American quiltmaker of the late 20th and early 21st century. She was born in Arkansas in 1936 and learned to quilt from her mother, but she did not practice quilting professionally until the 1970s, when she was living in Richmond, California. She credits her artistic ability to God and
Her quilts are delights of design, composition, color, shape, and texture. Recognizing her ability to quilt as a gift from God, she her artistic work has been directed to her healing and spirituality. They are works of improvisation from found materials that demonstrated whimsy, creativity and functionality. Some are abstract pieces of color, shape and texture that dance to visual music and the viewer to touch and feel. Other pieces have recognizable images that honor and narrate a political or social perspective. Not a few have scripture verses stitched into the material, perhaps indicating the spiritual dimensions of the work. In one particular piece the script is an abstract stitch woven across the span of the fabric.
observe that the stitching is actually a narrative. |
(c) |
Hymn
By Carl Phillips
Less the shadow
than you a stag, sudden, through it.
Less the stag breaking cover than
the antlers, with which
crowned.
Less the antlers as trees leafless,
to either side of the stag’s head, than—
between them—the vision that must
mean, surely, rescue.
Less the rescue.
More, always, the ache
toward it.
When I think of death, the gleam of
the world darkening, dark, gathering me
now in, it is lately
as one more of many other nights
figured with the inevitably
black car, again the stranger’s
strange room entered not for prayer
but for striking
prayer’s attitude, the body
kneeling, bending, until it finds
the muscled patterns that
predictably, given strain and
release, flesh assumes.
When I think of desire,
it is in the same way that I do
God: as parable, any steep
and blue water, things that are always
there, they only wait
to be sounded.
And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps
should ask pardon.
My fears—when I have fears—
are of how long I shall be, falling,
and in my at last resting how
indistinguishable, inasmuch as they
are countless, sire,
all the unglittering other dropped stones.
(c) by |
Caminante no hay Camino
por Antonio Machado
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.