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 20, 2004, 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time
Scott J. Plunkett, New York City
Untitled
OK, I admit it; whole gay marriage extravaganza in San Francisco has gotten to me. I've always felt a little disenfranchised from the "gay community," what does that mean anyway? I've never been a fan of blindly following social constructs like marriage, and I'm infuriated that the issue is being used as a political pawn. Not that anyone owes me, but my partner and I ought to feel secure. We're registered as domestic partners, and I don't live in New York by accident, but we have no real legal equality. We always planned to have a ceremony on our 10th anniversary, which was January 21st of this year, but we were both revolted by the all politics and didn't act. After all the screaming headlines and frustration and anger and boredom, I belatedly started reading the stories about the individual couples in San Francisco, the two guys, each holding one of their twin babies during their ceremony and especially the first couple married, Del Martin and Phyliss Lyon, who have been together for 51 years, and I get teary every time. I think it is time to get married.
Wendy Newton, Washington Heights, New York City
The Year in a Bar of Soap
At my shower last spring (which took place after my wedding – how unconventional), my sister gave me a bar of soap with three pairs of brides and grooms stuck inside it. From the moment I started washing my hands with it by the kitchen sink I developed a mild fixation on how slowly the bar of soap was dissolving, I wanted the little plastic prizes to pop out. The soap's dissolution became a tactile, mundane measure of time, a daily reminder of how imperceptible change can be until you look back and take notice, and I was impatient for the figures to emerge. First a hard shoulder stuck out, then two little heads. Finally the end of the bar dropped off and one tiny black and white couple was free. Progress is sort of like that. It tends to just happen whether or not you're impatient or even paying attention, unless of course you stop washing your hands completely (metaphorically speaking). Then you're just stuck, stalled out, not participating. Now we're down to the last bits of the bar which sits on a little red-rimmed plate in a thin film of soap scum. That's part of it too. After the moment you've been waiting for has finally come to pass, there are still the bits of soap and plastic to deal with. I want to use it up to the very last, when I'll wash the plate and recycle the brides and grooms (or just let them sit on the windowsill until one of the cats gets them). Then I'll be ready to move on to a new aesthetic fixation. Last year at this time Peter and I were the (eventual) winners in a battle with a major nor'easter, narrowly escaping to Rome while the snowstorm put the whole east coast in frozen traction. On the very serendipitous morning of February 22, 2003, we woke up, drank a cappuccino in the bar, bought flowers in the Campo di Fiori, and got married on the Campidoglio. It's really been a good year. I've enjoyed all the little moments strung together, all the dinners and arguments and breakfasts and romantic moments and parties and yoga classes. I'm just glad I'm able to appreciate it (more often than not), and thankful to have a partner who can appreciate it with me. This is progress.
Rosa Naparstek, Washington Heights, New York City
Triangulation v.1
What's On My Mind:
The personal is political
The line between privacy/secrecy
The recurring themes of presence, authenticity
and heart in the art work and comments
The desire for connection
Communication, communion, community
The Pathwork, The Diamond Method
Transformation, emergence, process
No one is an island entire of itself
Come live with me and be my love
and the Michigan State Motto:
"If you seek a pleasant peninsula,
look about you!"
Jason Gubbiotti, Washington, D.C.
check
I just purchased a plane ticket for March 22nd, 2004. It is the day that i am moving to france.
Dominik Lejman, Gdynia, Poland
sky color study
... Also looks like no skiing this year for me - so I am sending a skiing resort color study - an approximate sky color taken from as many skiing resorts webcams as possible last friday - take it as a postcard. [click here for a description of this project]
Jacie Lee Almira, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NYC
green
I walked outside today and the air and sun were invigorating. I've
even begun to sweat again and have a good perspiration stain on the green
shirt. Everthing seems back to normal.
Tim Folzenlogen, Washington Heights, New York City
Golden Ladders
What do you want to accomplish?
Whatever it is, it is beyond your current reality, or you would have already
accomplished it.
You must first become someone different than who you presently are.
How do you become someone you are not?
By being the person you are.
Should you have desires, then who you are, is someone with a goal.
With that goal in mind, simply interact, honestly and sincerely, expressing
exactly what you think; while always deeply considering what does and
does not come back.
With every interaction, you will learn, experience, grow, change, and
ultimately become the person who is living the goal you now desire.
But most people don't do that.
Most people choose to stay exactly as they are. They fear change, but maybe they can't admit that; and so they surround themselves with others who think as they do, and call this "the way it is." They find others to blame for why this is so, should they find their experience to be less than pleasant.
But they don't express that blame to those others, and deeply consider their response, because if they did, they would learn something more than the label, and then they would have to change, and they don't want to do that.
Joel Adas, Brooklyn
untitled
I was actually trying to get a photograph of Anya just peeking around our pet rabbit Lucy but she wound up disappearing behind the bunny. We were all three in our kitchen when 11:00 Friday morning rolled around and I was thinking about our lives together and how often we converge in the kitchen to talk and to eat. Often, I am crunching on my bowl of granola while the rabbit is munching her food. All our routines are so intertwined, almost synchronized. I think too that in a city like New York who you are with and the space you are with each other in becomes so important. There is a need to have a firm separation between the out there and the in here.
Laura Traverso, Washington, D.C.
dark light
Peter Ferko, Washington Heights, New York City
'Does Bliss Show?' Portrait #8: Creating Photographs
The moment. The present moment. The one at 11. But wait, I have to post last week's exhibit by 11. Gotta do that moment. Gotta hang the backdrop for this week. Stressing. Stay in the moment. Then switch to the next moment. Like yoga. Just be there. Until you aren't. Experimenting with a new technique that may not work. Just give it up. God, I love doing this. The moment is gone. What's next?
James Huckenpahler, Washington, D.C.
untitled
On my mind:
1
using illustrator for emergent works
2
Marvin Pontiac
3
The The playing Hank Williams
4
The Myth of American Democracy, and the hopelessness of imposing it in
a top-down fashion on the rest of the world.
5
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be in jail anywhere else in the
world.
Anya Szykitka, Brooklyn
Harry Blomgren
I am listening to WNYC (public radio), and they're talking about the Storycorps booth in Grand Central Station. I have been interested in oral history for some time. This is my mother's father. His image has recently come to me in Brooklyn from the north woods of Wisconsin. I'm very happy he's here, but he hasn't yet settled in. He was supposed to have been a "mean son of a bitch," and I'm sure he could be (he died before I really knew him). Tough, with legendary strength. There's a very old photo of him in front of a canvas tent in the woods, wearing an ammunition belt and a hatchet, holding up a dead wolf by the leg with one arm. He fought in France in World War I. He is from a different world than the one I inhabit now, in both time and place, but I also feel him to be very close by. Partly because I am learning more about him; and partly because my mother's being is infused with his deeds, neglects, and moments of tenderness; but mainly because the place he is from is the place I am from. And that place I know very well.
This Week's Guest Artists (How to join this project)
Helena Kupperman, Washington Heights, New York City
Landscape, oil on canvas
Here and now ...and then, every piece of art holds a promise for the future.
Stephen Beveridge, Washington Heights, New York City
I.N.S.
11 am is the foremost thing on my mind as I have missed the deadline three weeks running.
Anthony Gonzalez, Washington Heights, New York City
Untitled
I'd rather learn from one bird how to
sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
e. e. cummings
The hardest bones, containing the richest
marrow, can be conquered only by a united crunching of all the teeth of
all dogs.
Kafka
Renee Tamara Watabe, Verona, New Jersey
Ear Art
Seven years ago, I was weeping about how chemotherapy was
going to decimate the nerve endings in my baby's ears that could enable
him to hear things like the strains of a violin, certain songbirds, or
a whisper. Like someone was about to wipe out all the future violin concertos
in my son's life. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. Totally
powerless. God, I was pissed. My baby was perfect except for this evil
thing called a tumor that we had to kill before it killed him.
Today at eleven, Kathy, our audiologist, was fitting my son's ears with
hearing aids of his own colorful design. I was snapping photos, thinking
of the Now:Here:This "art spark," everyone was laughing at me
zooming in to get close up ear shots, and Josh was really excited about
his very cool and colorful aids. You would think he was getting a shiny
new sportscar, the way he was acting. Things turned out better than I
thought they would. You just never know....
Comments on Last Week's Now:Here:This
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From Daniel regarding Renee:
It IS perfect.
Symmetry. Dualism. Yin Yang.
Look at the pictures. Everything comes in pairs!
There's sadness. Hence, there's happiness.
There's evil. Hence there's good.
There's emptiness. Hence, there's fulfillment.
Most importantly, there's blindness. Hence, there's vision.
I am Chinese.
Totally Chinese.
And my mother used to tell me:
You can never see without an open mind.
See with the eye of the heart.
So then, do you see,
The desperation of your emptiness,
Calling for fulfillment?
If you do,
What are you gonna do about it?
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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