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BBQ at Ragan's house in Wallingford, Sarah and I left just before the fireworks
but then 1/5th of the way home I begged to see them and luckily Sarah had
to go back for her purse and by the time she got back to the intersection
of Wallingford Ave and 34th Street they'd just finished the national anthem
(the lyrics to which are an absurd glorification of war and fetishization
of starred and striped cloth) and a huge military helicopter was circling
lake union dragging a huge american flag underneath while loudspeakers played
ray charles. people actually cheered as the spotlit flag made its final pass.
i can relate to that kind of patriotism--i felt it very strongly as a child
and still remember a 4th of july parade when i was 6 during which i proudly
and energetically waved a cheap plastic flag where the stars and other white
parts were actually clear. but patriotism is a childish thing, born of an
us/them schoolyard mentality which preys on people's need to be accepted
by an artificial extended family (to use
kurt vonnegut's term based
on his anthropological studies). the irony is that independence day is a
celebration of revolution, of ousting greedy businessmen from power; to
commemorate it with a slavish display of flag worship and wild cheering for
the fruits of runaway military spending (taxation without representation
if ever there was any) is just silly. anyway, the fireworks were pleasantly
benign. if we're going to have huge explosions in the sky, let them be harmless
and pretty. then we went home and i stayed up late writing this artist statement
for a exhibit sarah is pitching to the good folks at Portland's
Orlo Gallery:
My goal is to find good
uses for "trash."
Landfills are filling up, toxins leach into the ground, literal mountains
of waste grow everyday, factories keep churning out product, forests are
being laid waste, global warming and overfishing are killing the one world
ocean. Most days I catch a glimpse of the traffic on I-5, 8 lanes wide,
slow-moving vehicles packed in tight. An amazing site even if it happened
just one time, but it's like that day after day and shows no signs of abating.
The people angry in their cars look less than human, as if the windshield
were a TV screen and they're trapped inside, imprisoned by the dream they
were conditioned to buy.
So I pick up car-flattened aluminum cans, collect them in a duffle bag, and
occasionally assemble them into
spirals. I want to bring attention
to the chronic degradation of the environment, prevent some material from
entering the waste stream, and transform the energy of casual indifference
(littering) through an act of reclamation and creativity.
Spiral is a fundamental form; it is the shape of our galaxy. To stare at
the center of a spiral more than a few feet in diameter causes the edges
of vision to curve and undulate. It's just an optical illusion, but it is
central to the piece to literally change the way people see.
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