Now: 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time every Friday.
Here: A community of artists in Washington Heights / Inwood and the world meeting in this online gallery.
This: A piece of art created Now and sharing the most important thing on our minds.
Scroll down to view the exhibit below. Thank you for participating in and viewing Now: Here: This.--Peter Ferko, Project Director
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all work ©2004 by artists named
Now: Here: This is funded in part by the Puffin Foundation
Now:
Here: This
February 13, 2004, 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time
Tim Folzenlogen, Washington Heights, New York City
Us and Them
Don’t you question yourself constantly?
If you care about someone, you think about him or her.
Questioning is what thinking is all about.
Why, then, do most people not want to be questioned?
I think it is because most all of the questioning that currently goes on, is intended to destroy the other. It’s a hostile environment out there. “I am right and you are wrong.” Everyone seems to be trying to hold everyone else back, in order to get ahead.
What if we all decided to actually care about, and help each other? What would we lose?
What if, instead of labeling and dismissing the people who pass through our lives - what if we engaged them? Expressed our concepts; just to see what happens. Asked the questions we’ve always had, but never expressed; just to see how the other might respond.
What if we thought about and questioned everyone, just exactly like we think about and question ourselves: simply because we want to know - or because we want to help the other to understand.
It wouldn’t take any longer than what we are doing now. It would just make what we do a lot more interesting. All this room for unlimited growth would start multiplying all around us. We’d become integral parts in the lives of others - as they would in our lives. Instead of thinking those same old thoughts that we have been repeating over and over again for our entire lives - suddenly we’d have all this fresh information and different perspectives to think about.
Just going to the grocery store is a lot more fun, once you and the checkout girl know each other’s name, and a little about each other.
Everything would get better with every single exchange.
Scott J. Plunkett, New York City
Untitled
The office is quiet and I’m leaving early. I’m having a good day, feeling more like myself than I have for a few months. Lately I’ve been able to do fill-in-the-blanks kind of stuff on images I had already started, but I haven’t been able to focus very well, I haven’t really been able to create much. I’ve been thinking about how to push my paintings further, how to retain clarity, yet make the paint or whatever medium more dynamic. This is a detail of a watercolor I started today, and a photoshopped detail of a painting I think I finished today. They’re not an answer, but a process to get to whatever is next.
Wendy Newton, Washington Heights, New York City
My Age Two Years Ago
Most Important Thing on My Mind: how this project is beginning to play tricks on my perception of the passage of time. Not that it wasn't already somewhat complex to begin with. Last week is this week. This week is next week. My boss turned sixty last summer and said that sixty is the new fifty, so forty must be the new thirty. I don't know exactly how this relates. I'm just awed that we're able to create some kind of narrative out of this messy flux.
PP, New York City
Tomorrow is Valentines Day
After wracking my brain I think there's no explaining love... it's an experience, a state to tap into. It includes so many situations, from making eye contact with the cat I'm babysitting, to completing this rusty heart; helping me feel expanded and connected.
Love is space and time measured by the
heart.
Proust
Jacie Lee Almira, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City
Rejection Letter
I'm feeling inspired by rejection and scouring old journals for ideas that never made it out.
Rosa Naparstek, Washington Heights, New York City
Roe v Wade (Front & Back)
I am consciously unaware that it is that time of year again and pull together some things in my studio before going out for the afternoon. On the train I remember the battle, now almost 32 years ago, and once again realize after the fact what I have done. Big canvasses stretch in my mind, history one stripe at a time red white and blue and I resolve to come back and paint what I see. But, I don't know how to paint, I don't know how to draw, I can only juxtapose one thing with another and make visible what refuses to be seen by me any other way.
Laura Traverso, Washington, D.C.
Red
what's on my mind...aineki and her valentine dance, she wants to dye her hair pink.
i can't wait.
James Huckenpahler, Washington, D.C.
The GOP's talking golem
At 11 last Friday, Iwas showing students video work by Ill Clan, Barney, Brandon MOrse, etc.
And audio of Burroughs, Eno, and Reich.
Trying to suss out a Democratic party that appears to have no long-term vision. GOP on the other hand is Gerrymandering towards dominance that could take decades to undo.
Revelling in failure, mistakes, accidents - always smarter/faster/better than anything I could come up with.
Cage got it right when he allowed the work to dictate its own terms; but he got it wrong when he wouldn't talk back to the work.
Bridget Shields, New York City
Untitled
The most important thing was actually taking the photos.
Peter Ferko, Washington Heights, New York City
'Does Bliss Show?' Portrait #7: Laughter
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a perfect description of how output
emerges from the creative process. I get cocky about being so creative,
so dexterous, so media independent, but so what?-one still has to face
the music. I've already taken all the self portraits I wanted to take
when I dreamed up this series. Now comes the rough time, when the Bad
and the Ugly come to town to challenge me to keep going with the series
and require me to take some more chances. We'll see who wins in the final
frame.
[press the triangular play button for the soundtrack to this portrait]
Anya Szykitka, Brooklyn
Sugar and Butter
Thinking about how much I have to do this morning, trying to get an image I like, but not enough time. Just the objects in front of me. Sugar and Butter. Sugar for the tea; butter for the toast.
This Week's Guest Artists (How to join this project)
Mike Fitelson, Inwood, New York
Fri., Feb. 13, 2004 @ 11 a.m.
I have to reenergize my photography. The only way to do that is to take one step at a time.
Renee Tamara Watabe, Verona, New Jersey
Edges/A Rose by any other name...
Thinking about the edges of my life, what is beyond them,
the edges, like the labels Pat mentioned a couple of weeks ago. ... about
how much I really want to reveal myself to anyone at all, how far do I
want to go, how much can I say?
Then, just as I was writing this exact sentence, my son offered me a fortune
cookie. I opened it and it said, "The important thing is to express
yourself." (Did I mention I am half Chinese? Is one of my ancestors
playing a joke on me?)
So, what else is on my mind? How my life is filled with metaphors, synchronicities
and hidden meanings. How the few moments of flashing quick images, placing
them side by side and thinking about it all helps me to transcend the
laundry, the pile of papers on my table, and the bigger losses I have
felt. How my womb mourns for things unfulfilled, or imperfectly fulfilled.
How Tim would say, "But Renee, dear, it IS perfect."
Anthony Gonzalez, Washington Heights, New York City
Vicious Pigs with Big Ideas
This week I have been thinking about certain close advisers to the president.
Karen Greene, Washington Heights, New York City
Untitled
Thought-- there may be surpizes in the shadows.
Comments on Last Week's Now:Here:This
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From Peter:
Vesna Pavlovic, a Belgrade artist who helped me refine parts of this project, recently wrote that she's been overwhelmed by 12 hour days on her own project and unable to submit to Now: Here: This. I checked out her project and it's worth seeing: The Book Project. According to Vesna, "it's been changing every day, and i hope it will stay as a platform for exchange for this whole network in europe even after the book comes out." I spotted this in an article called, "Is Free Good Enough?"
Mass media are not the most appropriate media for artistic (self) reflection, in fact, this is the most frequent art-trap which brave new media artists find themselves in...
The mass public plays its market role predictably and consistently. Spectacle, shock and gags are desired products, and if they are successful, they will receive the expected attention. The public is prepared to dig into their pockets for this type of product. But if it could have it another way, the mass public would not pay a penny for the desired product and it will gladly consume it as such, and even share it with others...
Relevant art production does not reflect the process of self-actualization and introspection (whose domain is private, intimate and religious) but the actual moment of tectonic disturbances of production relations of the industry of entertainment and intellectual work, the collective nature of creative and intellectual production, and its position on the map of interpretation and reinterpretation of media-information surroundings.
From Renee:
Regarding Petr's drawing
Leila is beautiful.From Tim:
In Response to James Huckenpahler
Art is like complicated handwriting. It's the outward expression of the artist's internal nature - their foundation and life experiences.
The reason that so much of that expression is mediocre in appearance, is due to the fact that most people place severe limitations on what they will allow themselves to think. "This is who I am." If they expand beyond their concept of themselves, they normally do so by nibbling away at the edges, growing by fractions of an inch at a time. They exist in tiny worlds, for the most part in isolation, cut off from the breath, the heart, the mind of all the other worlds.
In response to Peter, you spoke about this in terms of your own art. Your artistic expression is clogged - unsure - because you are, in your life.
You don't have the answer.
The answer is outside of your wall - as answers always are, or you'd have them.
The door through that wall may be locked and password-protected from the inside - but people from the outside can easily breeze through.
Your obstacles, to them, are like balloons filled with air. They can pop them without even being aware that that is what they are doing.
What they struggle with, what they need is your help, your insight, into what they see as being dead ends. You will laugh as you point out the passage they hadn't noticed.
I forsee a day, coming soon, in which there will be thousands and thousands of truly great artists. Every city has plenty of room for a few hundred or so.
It will happen, almost over-night, once the masses start to realize, appreciate and use, the very real magic of the universe, that has always been there, and that works every time.
All you have to do is to engage, honestly and sincerely, whoever shows up. Think about what they say, as if it came from the universe, and then respond. Repeat.
Who will show up? He or she will always be the perfect person, pertaining to whatever it is that you are thinking about. Try it. You will find that this is absolutely true. Maybe the key to the puzzel will come through the guy who delivers the Chinese food. Always be the student. The other always represents beyond who you are - and we all want to become someone greater.
Why does life have to be so hard? Maybe it's because you think that it does.
I think that people always get what they want - and what they seem to presently want is to stay in tiny boxes and, among other things, create a lot of mediocre art.
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Thank you, artists, commenters and viewers, for participating in Now: Here: This. -Peter Ferko
How to join this project | About the artists | Archived weeks
all work ©2004 by artists named