[The Impression of Play] on Cici James's [The Book Proprietress]

Living life between the covers within other lives isn't a bad place to be; it's where the artist has existed for the last 40,000 years, when the primitive began to scribble hieroglyphics on the walls of caves. We must presume not too long following, there came an instance when one of those primitive scribes pierced himself fatally, utilizing his own blood to attain a posthumous honor of becoming the unnamed martyr to absorb the writer into artist.

We see a woman, a proprietor, a direct ancestor in this lengthy bloodline from the primitive artist yet unnamed, pose bare amongst her books, half her body indistinguishable from the many tomes aligned on the shelves, then we see the beauty of not just the woman but the woman who represents an indivisible bond between the artist and the endless published doctrines which keeps him a slave to art, which confirms that the triumph of the individual over art is and has always been a mythical feat.

Many years have been lost to us; when we were younger, we were free to allow them to pass unmolested and between the beginning and the now, there is space,a response, stimulus, obedience to the paradoxes not in the interest of others and not in the interest of ourselves. The way this feels in the severe flanking of hands is completely foreign, non-responsive to gorgeous words, the elder frequency frequently dissecting edges of creation, wilting characteristics, silent obscenities, first observed umbilical conflict, catapulting the remainder of a world left purposefully so that unbearable disruption just may situate itself on the perimeter of the inappropriate, where my eyes first obtained vision, and after three decades of a hiatus, regained a vital force to gain their distinctio
n to see all the beauty in Cici James's nude representation of a woman no longer belonging to herself, but to the sadomasochistic relationship of writer and reader, bondage of the bygone greats, the impression of play between the mind and the soul, as the body lies bare, exposed, authentic and true.

by Dontrell Lovet't

[La Dolce Vita] on Opal's [The Elephant Gift to the Rat]

There's nothing more dubious,rather tragically comical, than a fearful being ingratiating a phobia; in the sense of the world as most whose lived it long enough to recall limitless pitfalls, prematurely, we label it lunacy. Outside of the in-the-box beliefs and idealization, wouldn't it be so much more
a sweeter life if we could simply bribe away those phobias with the exact cost they enact?


by Dontrell Lovet't

[Faceless;Chrysalis] On Amy Judd's [Mute Butterfly, 2013]

She's the woman nobody knows, the one who wonders why wandering amongst millions of people still leaves her without a face to be recognized.

Can there be a moreso double-edged resilient and frail existing things than the woman and the butterfly?

The original named given to a Buttefly was "Futterby," described almost inaccurate in the old English description, as a butterfly's stark colors, darling flight and becoming is of vast wonderment by everyone and everything that lays its  eyes upon it. Color brings dimension,offers an animate state, a zenith to serve as the platform in which to take flight. The woman, the reason humanity exist and why men have many times over waged wars over the rights of them, relentlessly evolves, socially and physiologically, lending to her stock, adding the buy-in to her heart an almost significant amount for the average man to ever accumulate; a greater difference; I've never figured a butterfly,its instincts notwithstanding,to ever feel the need for the natural world around it to validate its existence. It is against any laws of physics that may work against it, any form of modernism displacing its biome, its indication of Spring and a new year where all things bloom as beautifully as wayward flowers, the same bringing about repetition of evolution, events happening as anything inhabiting the earth, becoming disrupted by a new being not purposeful in its ability to usher in a pre-existing species into bondage, then soon after to an extinction not to the will and rights of its own self-destruction.

Will anyone ever know who this woman is? Will anyone ever inquire as to why no one knew before? Amy Judd only gives us the contours, replacing the physiogomy
with the variant visions we know nature never forfeits.




by Dontrell Lovet't

[American Studies] on Gordon Parks's [American Gothic]

            The study of the African-American and the study of America are one in the same; a people struggling to make a home in a hostile condition made hostile by their very angst.

            If a people are rendered invisible, it is a twofold-fault; the oppressor wielding intolerance and the oppressed for allowing what is being wielded to continuously hit target at will. The oppressor knows how to oppress, as once upon at time, they were the oppressed and possess the memory and methodology of how their dethroned oppressors were so effective until their sackings; the oppressed knows only the blindness that comes from the swollen, blackening eyes were clouts cease to land, because the oppressed knows from their former oppressors the mistakes those oppressors made which allowed them to break free; they allowed them to see, to gather and obtain visions, they allowed them to dream.

            History never repeats itself, every event in history, whilst having all the seemings of similarities, are bred by different circumstances and different events. A woman holds a broom in one hand and a mop in the other, a background of the American Flag. Her black skin represents the oppressed, one of the few of the American lands, her gender implies she must also mind men of all races, lest she fall victim to an opposing gender only content with her subjugation, the mop and broom, cleaning tools, are the tools used to sweep injustice under the rug of an American Ideal gone awry, which we see in the background, fifty stars, fifty states, fifty separate tales of horror and heinous forging of an American Empire.

[The Exterminating Dream III] Moveable Easels

            A true artistic ideal is the one that obliterates all in the name of its very creation; the artist, is this creative animal that lives a quiet life amongst the noise, behaving only recklessly on paper and canvas. With every urge to create arrives a frantic urge to recreate, what they have created and what has been created by another, ideal in need of updates, albums left to wither and denied their right to bloom in a new generations forfeiting their own right to turn around, take a step back and discover what it is that caused what they love today to become.

            Every man (anthropos) must account for their bruises and heal those very wounds if indeed they are to move past them; the artist deny such healing, expose the grotesque of the deep, impacted injury, photography, paint it, describe the hideous preludes and epilogues surrounding the impact, becomes the wound and becomes beautiful because of them. The trends of today, they are embrace and are happily left to be had by the sycophants fixed on being misers of gray matter; the art of yesterday becomes the billboards for the artist of today to not aspire to become as, to be aspire to become as they are, as for every individual, comes an individual stylism unique to their personality, their environment, fears, indifference and ambivalences, the very thing that breeds them.

[To Be a Man] A Poem

[To Be a Man]

There’s only one way to be a

better man; & that way,

is not the way of a manufactured

man,

A phantom of a phantom,

where compromised become of

defects, defection,

& feet falling forward cease

to footsteps from behind;

So there is a flaw,

there seem to be many,

I hear tell, as the census takers

take no time in figuring,

then from them,

the man,

who is not so much more worse off

than the next being applauded,

sees in himself acclimation,

henceforth never a change,

a wink dwindling beyond as far

as I will ever see-

[From the Age of 5] on Dorothea Lange's [Damaged Child]

            Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “From the age of 5 to the man I am now, is but a step; from birth to the age of 5 is an appalling distance.” Every childhood can be said to be plagued by the length it takes to cross such appalling distances. Every adult can remember some point in time in their childhood where they first experienced danger, peril, a closing window or a grip suddenly slipping loose of its object, sending them into what might have seem the longest free-fall, the true lesson and introductory of physics.

            When a child receives love, a child receives all potential this world has to offer; when denied that love, they become another species manoeuvring off instinct to simply survive. Once survival becomes a child number one instinct, a return to a state of compassion or want of compassion is almost nil or an improbability; orphaned children usually don’t take to crying because they know it’s no point, it’s a waste of energy, and as for skills, they are honed over a long stretch of loneliness in a world that has taken from this, for some unfathomable reason, a family, so what they never find is a reason to care for anyone else beyond what they need and who they need to scuttle, to survive.