living out of boxes

standing out, or outside.

over my ravens head

This one comes from three sources:
-center image is a Nuxalk raven mask, mid to late 19th century, and is from an ad for Listening to Our Ancestors:  The Art of Native Life Along the North Pacific Coast, which opened today at the National Museum of the Native American in New York.   I found this ad in the Arts section of the NY Times, and had to use it because of my penchant for images of North Pacific Coast ravens.     

-the waves are drawn but appropriated from Rookwood tiles that depict a scene with the three ships of Columbus (633 from 1000 Tiles)

-and the red heart-like shapes are medieval designs that were used in some mid-fourteenth c. tiles, "printed tiles", from England (212 from 1000 Tiles)

I love making stuff with designs from that tile book!

past the expectations

Each of these illustrations were drawn, appropriated, from the context of  much larger sources.  Here they are:

top L:  a comic from *"the Pickle Fork" by Megan Kelso.
top R:  a section of "In other folks' homes" (Plate 5) by Elizabeth Catlett, from The Negro Woman, 1946-47
bottom L: a comic from *"Wednesday Morning Yoga" by Ellen Forney.
bottom R: a comic from *"Turtle Pancakes" by Robyn Chapman.

*these comics are compiled in the book Scheherazade:  Comics about Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters, edited by Megan Kelso

line art

Here are two re-renderings of illustrations appropriating work from artists featured in a fine-art zine, The Drama, from a 2005 issue, which I picked up last Friday at 305 South.
The 'W. Tell' on the left traces back to a print made by David Abbott. 
And, on the right, are figures appropriating the style of Megan Whitmarsh. 

mountain mother

writing and typing in and out of boxes.

[
GIRL'S LAMENT
In the years
when we were all children, this inclining
to be alone so much was gentle;
others' time passed fighting,
and one had one's faction,
one's near, one's far-off place,
a path, an animal, a picture.

And I still imagined,
that life would always keep providing
for one to dwell on things within,
Am I within myself not in what's greatest?
Shall what's mine no longer soothe and understand me as a child?

Suddenly I'm as if cast out,
and this solitude surrounds me
as something vast and unbounded,
when my feeling, standing on the hills of my breasts,
cries out for wings
or for an end.
]

Rainer Maria Rilke

continued.

 

 

a song for my mother.

I've decided to make an album for my Mom of songs I know she'll like but hasn't heard.  here's no. 1:

on & on
[
oh what a day, what a day, what a day,
peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned
if your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned
if we were made in his image then call us by our names
most intellects do not believe in g-d
but they fear us just the same

on & on & on & on
my cipher keeps moving like a rollin' stone
on & on & on & on
alright till the break of dawn
]
erykah badu

deadline.