MAY 17, 2004
Welcome:Bienvenidos
This
exhibit is an "art spark" generated by a community of artists
living around the world. Every week, we meet at this virtual studio/gallery
to share work and the most important thing on our minds.
Artists are invited to join Virtual:Comunidad.
Some material may not be suitable for children
©2004 by artists named
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Theresa Murphy
Paris, France
Learning to Want
what am i thinking right now,...
about learning to want
and the black and blue of wanting
and the exquisite shadow that wanting indelibly projects
on sidewalk on thouroghfare on currents
wanting to breath
wanting wings... to take in beauty of just a moment
and wanting myriad flavors of the other (the many others)
to melt and flow within
to then flow out
PP
New York City
Thank You
I stayed at some friends' in Stone Ridge, NY and wanted to say thank-you and not in a usual humdrum email or text message; so I made a literal "bread and butter card." Looked for high-etiquette info on it but could only find this:
When you have been staying over Sunday, or for longer, in some one’s house, it is absolutely necessary that you write a letter of thanks to your hostess within a few days after the visit.
"Bread and butter letters," as they are called, are the stumbling-blocks of visitors. Why they are so difficult for nearly every one is hard to determine, unless it is that they are often written to persons with whom you are on formal terms, and the letter should be somewhat informal in tone. Very likely you have been visiting a friend, and must write to her mother, whom you scarcely know; perhaps you have been included in a large and rather formal house party and the hostess is an acquaintance rather than a friend; or perhaps you are a bride and have been on a first visit to relatives or old friends of your husband’s, but strangers, until now, to you.
Anthony Gonzalez
Washington Heights, New York City
Untitled
Bush has parlayed the fear engendered by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon into foreign and domestic policies that he could never have gotten away with pre - 9/11. How many new Al Qaeda recruits has he delivered in the process? Is the world safer now? Each time the New York Times refers to the "war on terror" without prefacing that phrase with the words "the so-called" they are unwittingly promoting the administration's agenda of equating Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden. Who can be against a war on terror? A large percentage of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and George Bush is not inclined to enlighten them.
Peter Ferko
Washington Heights, New York City
local color
Actually, there are two most important things on my mind: choosing a digital camera and what I'm doing with my life. It's odd that they both occupy the same amount of mental space. The camera issue will be resolved when my selected model is released later this month. The other thing is more of a nightmare; options keep emerging, demands on my time compound, nothing is falling away, things are falling through cracks, nothing I'm doing is getting done very well. Kind of like the job the builder did on these vents. I hope my distracted mistakes are better camouflaged.
Scott J. Plunkett
New York City
untitled
I think that we are less human after the prisoner torture in Iraq. Our "morally superior" culture produced the smiling torturers. This war has become even more sickening.
Tim Folzenlogen
Washington Heights, New York City
slip
What people will soon come to realize is that, rather than being a chaotic soup of conflicting opinions; life is actually an understandable, unfolding discussion, and that there are those who understand far more than others.
Like Einstein. He understood stuff that was way ahead of his time, but what he understood then became available to anyone who wanted to know.
There are fundamental things about life in this universe that are thus far misunderstood by most everyone. Once understood, everything changes.
The world we live in is going to radically change - like all the changes that have happened so far on this planet, added together, and multiplied by a billion – and this will happen in your lifetime.
Renee Tamara Watabe
Verona, NJ
What a Woman Wants
Image Four: World Peace/Kiss Me
Out here in suburbia it is all well and good to wish my son gets a home run in his little league game, or listen while my daughter dreams of becoming President of the United States, ponder the new colors on my wall, or even meditate on my life’s mission.….but all I can hear in the background is the sound of people wailing, bleeding, being raped and violated, humiliated and hated with a fierceness that sends chills up and down one’s spine. I tell my kids, if you can’t make peace with your brother, how will there ever be peace in the Middle East? I am starting to sound lame to myself. It is all so out of control.
My neighbor is a lovely person, and a fervent Christian. She asked me if I had seen the Passion. I told her, I won’t go. I have had enough of Messianic Iconic Theology. I nurture the fantasy that if we each relate to one another like Gods and Goddesses, see ourselves that way, without all the go betweens, couldn’t that begin to untwist all the knots? Couldn’t we find the way to wield our power without smashing the other?
Tim and I were discussing the prisoner abuse on the news, administered by our American "Heroes" and the murderous acts in retaliation. He said, simply "We are Them."
Like Rosa said, "Nothing but Everything will ever be enough." Any ideology that creates an Us vs. a Them, a "chosen" people, class, party or nation, or a salvation for anyone but everyone, just isn’t going to ever endure.
Rosa Naparstek
Washington Heights, New York City
What Dreams May Come
In the last few weeks I have taken three trips and have
missed not being part
of the on line community. I went to Washington, DC for the Women's March,
then to the Omega Institute in Rhinecliff for a conference on politics
and
spirituality and then down to Florida to see my mother. I have come back
keenly
aware how tied my political self has been to the little girl working hard
to lift
sadness and pain from her parents lives. Born into their world of mourning,
I
spent decades afraid to feel. But I now realize, more strongly than ever,
that
it is only through genuine happiness and joy reaching out beyond itself
that we transform the world.
In his essay on Mel Gibson's movie Passion of Christ, Matthew Fox says,
"Here lies the ultimate scare of the movie and its success. It speaks to and elicits from people in our culture a desire to wallow in necrophilia (love of death) at the expense of biophilia (love of life)...Erich Fromm in his brilliant study on evil, An Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, writes: 'Necrophilia grows when biophilia is stunted.' And this is how evil is unleashed in the world."
end of exhibit