VEXICON: Cries & Whispers

  

If you were to release all your secrets,
all those heavy words,
you would rise, rise, rise
into the horizon, free. Bewildered.
— Anita Endrezze 

 

 

Cries and Whisperings I

Is Sleeping NO CAMPING?

For Heavens Saké!

With All Due

 

 

 Cries and Whisperings II

 VEXICONIC appearances fracture and re-puzzle

Word Image Place Time.  

 

In The Commons what emerges, looms, invites?  

Resolve, anger, fear, desire, loss, yearning!

Near The Edgelands what?

Pauses, gaps, the unsaid ...

 

Oh, you know -- Life! 

Touching is NOT harmful 

VEXICON copyrighted trademarked by ToBeCome LLC

All lefts and rights Unreserved

No signs were harmed in this production

Object and Event

You are not alone.
Millions wonder where it ends.
We suspect nothing stands still.

Recalling.... Genesis blossoms from nothingness. Her agitated twin Origin appearing as Prometheus dreams back to from where we come. Vulnerability to before-fire intimation and winking-dark seduction leads the long way out of paradise.  

We have yet to arrive at the flaming gate.

...

NOTE
— Image-photo-modified: Sculpture by Jan Zach, Prometheus (1958) at UO
— Further and before: Slow Fire, March 2022
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2022/03/slow-fire.html

...

CODA
There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind, she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant. —Joan Didion

Underpassage: She Who Sees

Original Deer Feb 2014

 A community project guided by artist Kari Johnson.
Below:  New Deer 2017

 Artwork by Kari Johnson, after over-painting Original Deer

This artwork of a place I call Underpassage: the six-block city park zone in Eugene under a prominent north-south freeway overpass which as a bridge crosses the Willamette River leading into and away from downtown.

Deer through various visitations, occupations, degradations, 2020-2022. Below, early-March 2022.

In March 2022 City closed the park-zone. The public, including campers, excluded, the area fenced, the concrete painted, ground reseeded.

Mid-2023 re-opened as a public park. Below, with anti-graffiti coating on the original artwork, artist Kari Johnson scraped off ODOTs latex paint-over -- revealing and resurrecting -- Deer of the Underpassage.

Fall 2023. Kari renovated and extended the mural-artwork. Below, December 2023.

NOTE The mask-like image on the left of the Deer mural-artwork is adapted from the Tsagiglalal (or Tsagaglalal) motif.

 

This bear-mask-motif appears in various styles in rock art and artifacts of the indigenous peoples of Lower Columbia River and the Chinook areas of the Northwest coast.  A prominent — and iconic — petroglyph of Tsagiglalal on the Washington side of the river across from The Dalles was photographed in the early 20th century and later became famous - and commercialized - in popular culture as She Who Watches.  There have been and are many ways to experience the petroglyph-as-image and its intent.  “She Who Watches” may be a passive observer, a protector, a guardian, a fearsome warning, an omen of death, a witch, a witness, a supplication. She-Who-Sees-All-the-Comings-and-Goings holds closest to this evocative presence. I believe this image — as mask, as persona, as apparition, as resurrection — may open us to ever greater patience in the face of the unknown. 

Paralleling

I don't want to tell you the truth. I want to tell you the right thing. —Traci Brimhall

Our thoughts have a life of their own, independent of our will. —Emerson

To paint a still life, a painter and an apple must confront and adjust to each other. ―Albert Camus

Duration crinkles space to place
Gazing through infinite parallels —
Without wishful convergence,
No dangling divergence,
Absent fake vanishing point.
 

In this finding at zero point, a single still point,
Symbiotic star bodies called walls stream by
signaling eternal animation — 
Pinballed abstracts on the move.

Relativity as such.
Surprise!

The artful universe an unbending all-strikes alleyway!

NOTES
— Traci Brimhall, from the poem Light in the Basement, in the collection Rookery (2010, Crab Orchard Review)
— Emerson, from the Journals, 1865

― Albert Camus, Create Dangerously, a lecture on December 14 1957

(PDF of the Lecture, given four days after awarded the Nobel in Literature)

― Image below: detail of Mosaic by Russell Ziolkowski in Springfield City Hall

 

The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world.
― Albert Camus, in Create Dangerously

VEXICON: Uncomfort Zones

Will you tell us stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
    — Ada Limón

ONLY ONLY (Stop when red sky flashes)

 NO CAMP

 Insurance to protect what ...

 THIS Is Kalapuya Land (Eugene Skinner “founder” of Eugene)

 leave.

We can all ... 

 (Rosa at LTD bus station)

 Security by SONITROL (Flaming Ukraine)

(Signaling Box: Territorial Imperative)

 (Lightning and Detritus: Things Go Better With Coke)

(Grounding the Ghost) 

 PERSERVANCE (Japanese-American art memorial detail)

 GOD BLESS *USA* (Territorial Imperative II)

 I’ve Offered Everything … Still ...

I (Heart) MY GF

NOTES
— Ada Limón from the poem The contract says: we'd like the conversation to be bilingual. In her collection The Carrying (2018)
— William T. Vollmann, from Four Men: Keeping company with outdoor people. Harper’s Magazine, November 2023.

I would rather not be sorry about something when I am not going to do anything about it.
        We do not speak of this among ourselves, but I believe that most inside people aspire to the same righteous peace for which I reached in the previous sentence. — William T. Vollmann

END (Really?!)
Signs! Words! (Command.Ask.Plea.) Shaping way-finding in public places. Does anyone look. Yes, this maker of sign, that writer of words, briefly. How can these signalings matter as we move along the street, saunter sidewalk, slide in underpass, or over. View the news. New as old. The comfort, the complicit. Walls. Porous borders... How?
(ONLY ONLY to begin again)