Collages by Douglas Beauchamp presented here as extracted from the deep archives. Any resemblance to actual events or insistent memories is exquisitely tangential.
12 June 2022
19 May 2022
ARTHROPOCENE
1954: Onset of Arthropocene: the urgent exoskeletal sibling to Anthropocene with its burgeoning vertebrate legions.
Now, we’ve arrived at the swarming convergence of three (un)realities.
One vector: the recent and continuing, alarming news about the demise of multiple arthropod species, notably Insects and Crustaceans.
Second factor: Our hyper-awareness of Arthropods appearing in our town — as we stroll, as we dine, as we gaze, Yes, They return our gaze, with quickening desire, with appetite.
Third: the metamorphosing metaphor spawned by 1950s “horror” films; stark emergence of mutant arthropodal creatures — motivated, invasive, irradiated.
Wait. A cautionary dimension: Street Art. Illustrated herein with a variety of painterly arthropods in various stages of infestation. The streets, the art in 21st century Eugene, Oregon.
Photos Douglas Beauchamp. All rights preserved in amber.
These public paintings may be officially authorized decorations, condoned community expressions, or simply hatch out of nowhere. Fleeting images — realer-than-real, glowing, inverted, eradicated. Do not make the mistake of thinking that what happens on walls is purely imaginative.
NOTES
Arthropocene and its cultural milieu merged from and during the Atomic Era:
— 1954: Them! The first feature film to use insects — irradiated ants become monsters with a final battle in the concreted Los Angeles River drainage.
— 1955: In nearby Orange County, Disneyland opens launching Adventureland —an exotic tropical place dreaming to be a far-off region of the world — "To create a land that would make this dream reality” — Walt Disney.
— 1957: Further… Beginning of the End — radiation used to grow giant vegetables is eaten by locusts, who naturally enlarge and become understandably voracious and… the title says it. Attack of the Crab Monsters — Pacific Ocean, a Disney-like tropical island where atomic tests alter plants and animals among them an intelligent and ambitious Crustacean confronting innocent scientists.
— Honorable mentions: The Wasp Woman (1960), a hybrid femme fatale. Mothra (1961), the breakout franchise who doesn’t know how to stop.
— The List goes on and on… leading to… ARTHROPOCENE (2022) with its countless waterway invasives, airborne exotics, and vectoring tropical stingers.
END CREDITS
After diligent online searching, I have found only two instances of Arthropocene used in the eco-environmental sense I have exposed and expoused:
— Arthropocene:Coleoptera:Ips Typografus — a six-minute experimental film (2020) about “the relation we are developing with arthropods in the edge of a climate crisis." In this case, the Ips Typografus beetle. The artists Augusto Gerardi and Estefania Montero note, since 2018 all the forests in Europe are at risk because the outburst of this beetle. (Recommended)
— The Arthropocene: An Introduction to Invertebrates Informing Ecosystem Health and Ecological Restoration in Freshkills Park, SI (2021). An Honors Thesis by Audrey Becker (PDF)
01 May 2022
VEXICON 2022: May Day
Muffin be Sweet: The Poem
ARE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
The wild world itself is Holy
Breath Is A Sacred Bridge
Grateful 4 Any Random Acts
CANCEL BILLIONAIRES
hungry
Happy Birthday Emily My Baby your 17
(Am)nesty (f)or EVERY
SKILL YOUR SELF
TELL YOUR FRIENDS YOU LOVE THEM
LOVE & RAGE
LOST Toy barbie dog
Trespassing
LOVE
...
Suite of images with found metal intaglio, woodblock, notebook paper, brick, and pressure relief on Rives BFK Weighted. Dimensions vary. Limited editions: price-cost-value varies from Free to Priceless. Images: Fair Use. All Photos via D.Beauchamp as appearing in The Eugene Oregon Commons Zone, in Year 2022 of "Colossal Uncertainty"
...
As seen/scene in Seasons 1-4 in The VEXICON Series:
VEXICON 4: Desire Anyway. December 31 2021
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/12/vexicon-4-desire-anyway.html
VEXICON 3: Loves & Forebodings. July 2 2021
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/07/vexicon-2021-loves-forebodings.html
VEXICON 2: Signs as signs as signals. January 25, 2021
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/01/vexicon-2-signs-as-signs-as-signals.html
VEXICON: Signs of the Times 2020. October 9, 2020
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/10/vexicon-signs-of-times.html
WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS Productions, All Rights Unreserved.
22 April 2022
Avian Mundi
What is Real: Birds in Art. Avian Mundi!
Earth Day -- this even-numbered 4-22-2022 -- we wonder, Really?! Whose Earth, and How so goes the Earth? And the millions of remaining birds.
NOTES
The Science is out there. The News is not promising. Extinctions hover.
Avian Mundi bows to her guides: Axis Mundi and Anima Mundi. The tripartite imaginary of being and becoming. Still center residing.
Eerily Avian Mundi -- Bird-Earth-Sky-Water -- will endure as future residue on urban walls. Reminder/remainder of the dilemma dear.
Rolf Jacobsen:
I am the bird that flutters against your window in the morning,
and your closest friend, whom you can never know,
blossoms that light up for the blind.
...
I am the one you have loved for many years.
I walk beside you all day and look intently at you
and put my mouth against your heart
though you're not aware of it.
--Murals/Street Art/Wall Art/Eugene/Springfield. As artists are identified, this post will be updated. These photos present details out-of-context of the dynamic urban scene within which they appear, arise. Some no longer exist, a form of erasure-extinction. Contact me if curious. Photos Douglas Beauchamp. (Click to enlarge)
--ABOVE: Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994), two stanzas from the poem Guardian Angel, trans Robert Bly from Norwegian.
--BELOW: Bird, a poem by the English poet Frances Horovitz (1938-1983) in Collected Poems, 1985, Bloodaxe Books.
--Recent article in The Guardian by Zoe Williams: ‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists.
Bird
leave the bright voices on the edge of the wood
follow the bird quick
arrow — messenger —
into the still shadow of the waiting trees
light falls from leaf to leaf
spattering gold is leaf is light
and bird
shadow swift
falls - follows
the air - speeds
in shafts of green
vanishing invisible
as echoing song ahead
trails silence in the choir of trees
brown moss quiet underfoot
sunlight glitters in the empty glade
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