After Art Grows Up and Leaves Home

Yogis and physicists talk about a deep level of reality that underlies everything we know consciously and unconsciously.  Our experiences, thoughts and actions exist only in the top skim of things, like the rings of rippling water after we skip a stone across its surface.  The process of making art sometimes brings artists nearer to that deeper realm.  I hope the process of viewing the art can bring the onlooker there also.

My poem "Lyrics for Electron Playground" is about existing in these levels of reality .  The poem is incorporated into an artwork, "Electron Playground". That artwork is now in Rider University's Permanent Collection, and is hanging in a new building on campus, North Hall.  Last week I went to see it there.  It is beautifully installed in a plexiglass wallbox at the end of a hallway: 

ELECTRON PLAYGROUND, ©JoyKREVES, 2010

LYRICS FOR

ELECTRON PLAYGROUND

Heart beats
Dog barks
Turtle dies

Tides pull
Leaves turn
Lightnings spark

Dreams are born where
electrons dance and
baby is the oldest brain alive

Time is now here
Time is nowhere
Time is now here

Heat rises
Cat awakens
Baby cries

Moons rise
Nudes descend
Poppies bud

Dreams thrive where
electrons bounce and
youth are the prophets of night

Time is nowhere
Time is now here
Time is nowhere

Hearts stop
Sirens wail
Oceans expire

Forests grieve
Rains drown
Air sours

Dreams collide where
electrons play and
sages gaze beneath the finish line

Time is now here
Time is nowhere
Time is now here

                      -Joy Kreves ‘10

I've been prejudiced in believing that artists and people involved with the humanities have a headstart on leading meaningful lives.  Apple's Steve Jobs' life was proof that, in fact, it is the ability to think creatively in any field that enables one to leave behind a trail of significant achievements. Being able to think creatively is the key, because it gives one a better chance of finding an access to the deepest plane of reality, that plane beyond conscious reach.  I am convinced that this is where real meaning resides and those who taste it are deeply enriched by the experience.

As I was looking at my ELECTRON PLAYGROUND piece in the hallway, a friend who teaches philosophy at Rider came by.  He was excited because his office is in this new building, just down the hall from my piece, and he wanted to show me that he had hung my DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL over his office desk.  He purchased that piece and another from the series several years ago, and they both hung in his home for awhile.  He then proceeded to tell me a story in which he was

DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL, ©JoyKREVES, private collection

the classic absent-minded professor.  A prankster friend had stayed at his house and re-hung every piece of his artwork upside down.  My professor friend never noticed until he brought DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL to the college, that the friend had also turned my spiral upside down!  Even then, it was the gallery director who helped him hang it, who noticed my upside down signature.  It's in a metal shadowbox frame, and the friend had actually unscrewed the hanging wire to reverse the piece.  My friend, lost in the world inside of his head, never noticed that DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL was now DOUBLE-FOOTED SPIRAL!  I console myself by remembering that any good artwork can "work" in any direction.  Or so they claim. Actually, the space depicted in the spirals is not tied to a horizon; it is a broader more universal "deep space" that includes notions of time and timelessness, as does ELECTRON PLAYGROUND, and I admit that I have also lost track of what was right-side-up for several of the pieces at certain points in time. 

Yesterday I attended the reception for the ABSTRACT SHOW at The Coryell Gallery in Lambertville where several of my friends are showing.  Once again I came away being very confused as to what really constitutes "abstract" art.  For me, there has never been a meaningful division between abstraction and realism.  It seems a work is considered "abstract" as soon as it departs from the depiction of "things" and ventures into a depiction of "space", but as we learn that space is jammed full and not empty at all, and as we are able to see this stuff quite tangibly with increasingly high powered technology, the term "abstraction" loses meaning.  Hopefully, through technology or meditation, many of us can dive down to that deep plane of omniscient awareness that seems to be the basis that unites everything as well as everynonthing, every potential thing.  In a utopian scenario of the future most of us would get in deeper touch with our creative selves and thus leave behind a truly significant trail in our wake.  Pondering a work of art, whether upside or down, can sometimes open the door to a world so much larger than ourselves. Time may not exist in the most abstract reality, but in our manifested everyday reality, the time is now.  Art grows up and moves away, but once comprehended, it's effect is never erased. Whether we turn it upside down or sideways, whether it is "abstract" or "realistic", it aids us in leading meaningful lives.  Awesome.