social commentary

open studio: catching UV rays /  by kelly heaton

Catching UV Rays in at Tired Beach, Colorado (2016).  Digital photo collage.  Kelly Heaton

Technically, we can't see UV... but if we could, it would look something like extremely rich purple.  The good news about big holes in the ozone layer is that we will have plenty of opportunity to train (more likely evolve) our eyes to see weird photons. Seeing as the oceans will rise a good amount, I figure that Colorado could have some nice beachfront property.  I hear that they have a massive dump of old tires in Colorado, a "tire graveyard" as they morbidly call it.  Tires are very slow to decompose and are not prone to erosion like soil or sand.  What a great place to relax in the late Anthropocene!

open studio: apocalypse of the heart /  by kelly heaton

Apocalypse of the Heart, 2016.  Digital photo collage. Kelly Heaton

In case you're wondering why the flurry of blogging, I am once again bedridden - this time, with a bad cough and malaise.  I'm sketching ideas on my computer, so it's not all bad.  In case you're wondering why the cheesy apocalyptic image: I am obsessed with human impact on the planet and it makes me awfully depressed, but I am determined to cure myself with humor and beauty.  As a child of the 70's, there's nothing dearer to my heart than a technicolor view of life, especially where love and nature are concerned.  Admittedly, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is a product of the '80s, but the shoe fits.

open studio: harbingers /  by kelly heaton

Harbingers, 2015.  Digital photo-collage.  Kelly Heaton

Consumerism, pollution, dependence on fossil fuels, e-waste, climate change, off-shore garbage disposal, inequity of access to Earth's basic natural resources, manmade illness, children raised in ecological poverty, living conditions for future earthlings, the heaven that is natural Earth ...

open studio: selfie on the raft of medusa /  by kelly heaton

Selfie on the Raft of Medusa, 2015. Digital photo collage. Kelly Heaton

I made this photo-collage, "Selfie on the Raft of Medusa," 2015, after Theodore Gericault's epic painting, "The Raft of the Medusa," 1818-1819. Gericault portrays the hastily constructed life raft of the Medusa, a French naval frigate that wrecked in 1816 killing most of her crew and creating an uproar over the perceived incompetence of the French monarchy. It's one of the greatest paintings in history. 

Joseph Campbell attributes the myth of Medusa to "an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma, which has been registered in this myth, much as what Freud terms the latent content of a neurosis is registered in the manifest content of a dream: registered yet hidden, registered in the unconscious yet unknown or misconstrued by the conscious mind."

Medusa: rage of the feminine principle. She speaks to me right now. She speaks of frustration with human self-absorption, abuse of Mother Earth, dependence on fossil fuels and electricity, and hubris.

Jack London quotes Benjamin de Casseres in 1914: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that sets him free."