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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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