A Dose Of Art

Yesterday, I had a chance to view a unique form of contemporary art, its called Installation Art. With a friend in tow, we visited the Charleston Heights Art Center here in Las Vegas. The exhibit is called "Intention To Leave" by Robin Starbuck.

Installation art according to Wikipedia.org, uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way a particular space is experienced. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can be any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces. Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created.

"Intention to Leave" is a two chapter video projection. Chapter one includes live footages and digital animation of a frozen island landscape that seemingly represents a world uncorrupted by the human hand and so somehow not quite earthly. As the video progresses, a dark city arises from the sea. The city, and the mechanical sound of its emergence imply the catastrophic menace of mankind to the tranquility of the land.

In chapter two, the branding and castration of buffalo is preseded by the buffalo shaman tumbling through space. He is accompanied by the chanting of a Vajra Guru mantra. According to the artist's statement, this Tibetan mantra is meant to represent all of the twelve blessings of the Buddhist way. It's repeated recitation is meant to remove completely emotional corruption and to affect liberation from misdeeds causing rebirth and hampering the path to enlightenment. In this chapter, the mantra is sung both normally and in reverse. In this way, according to the artist, it becomes both a prayer and suspicion of prayer. The meaning of the video is then open to the viewers. Sins or misdeeds are either being removed from the suffering animals, represented by the castrations of the buffalos, or from humans or somehow the message is being inverted entirely.

On the walls of the gallery space are graphic images of radio waves. These are pattern replicas of radio waves captured from outer space. To this day the government maintains dozens of laboratories where radio waves or "messages" from outer space are captured and analyzed.

According to the artist, this exhibition, "Intention to Leave"is intended as a poem of warning. It is a speculation on the condition that humanities relationship to the earth and a suggestion that we humans may possibly be mere visitors to this planet; a planet we found, inhabited and seeking to destroy before the day we leave to find another. What suffers at our hands; the land, other creatures, water tables, and air quality, mean little to us. Unless we engage in magical transformation once radio contact is made, we humans will be gone.

This exhibition is a multimedia/digital presentation about the cycle of life and death and the sources of imagery are as diverse as cattle ranching to warfare combined with Buddhist chants and overlaid narration.

As I watched the presentation, I did not know what the artist intended to convey. Fortunately, the artist statement distributed before you enter the gallery helped a lot in understanding the whole thing. This kind of contemporary art is more interesting because it would involve the use of all your senses in order to understand and appreciate the artist's message. I'm looking forward to see and experience more of this interesting art form.

Desiderata

Does anybody remember the old poem "Desiderata"? I remember that this was mentioned during my high school days, I cant remember which year. Anyway, the poem's popularity at that time was brought about by the spoken-word recording of the said poem.

To refresh your memory and to understand its brief history, I have checked the ever reliable Wikipedia for the information. Here below is the brief history of this poem according to Wikipedia:
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"Desiderata" (Latin for "desired things", plural of desideratum) is an inspirational prose poem about attaining happiness in life. It was first copyrighted in 1927 by Max Ehrmann.

In the 1960s, it was widely circulated without attribution to Ehrmann, sometimes with the claim that it was found in Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, Maryland, and that it had been written in 1692 (the year of the founding of Saint Paul's). Nevertheless, the estate of Ehrmann has kept various editions of the work in print. A spoken-word recording of the essay was made by Les Crane and reached #8 on the Billboard magazine charts in late 1971.

At least one court case has held the poem to be forfeited to the public domain because of distribution during and before World War II, but other cases have ruled that the assignee, through Ehrmann's heirs holds the purchased copyright.
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So there you are, the history of Deiderata.
If you read through the lines, its essay about how to live life to the fullest,how to handle relationships with other people, still holds true up to this day. All of us are in a never ending pursuit of happiness.

Included in this post is the full text of the poem, just click the picture itself and you will get a much larger view. If you want a copy of the sound file for the spoken-word recording by Les Crane, you can always drop me an email at jaypeelo@cox.net

I hope you can learn much out of this poem.

My New Digital Camera

Photography is one art form that I wanted to pursue ever since I had my hands on my first SLR film camera back in the Philippines. It was a Minolta and I forgot the model number. Anyway, I got it from my former co-worker and he was kind of my mentor in photography. That old camera had some problems with its sensor and became useless even before I could master the tricks in taking artsy photographs.
When I arrived here in the USA, my first digital camera was a Sony Cybershot camera. I fell in love with it, learn its functions and features by heart so I became very comfortable with it. Eventually I have outgrown my little digicam and started eyeing on a more higher and advanced digital SLR cameras.
I got myself a Nikon D60 DSLR camera with a very good deal. I got an additional zoom wide angle lens and a camera bag for everything to put in. Right now, I'm trying to learn its features and functions. I tried using my new camera last night for a session of night photography. I cruised along the Las Vegas Strip and took some pictures, some of which are bad, some are outrageous and some are kind of average. I tried to use the manual functions of the camera and that's what the good thing about using digital cameras, you can always delete those undesirable pictures you've taken.
I'll make an online album exclusively for the pictures taken from my Nikon and I will announce it here when its ready to launch.
Pictures I posted here in this blog entry are some of the few who survived my rigid screenings. If you dont like them, you can just imagine the rest of the pictures that I took.

Back To Normal???

I'm done with my three weeks of mayhem at work. Well, its not really that bad, everything was manageable enough. The only drawback was, I was no longer online most of the time to chat with my friends and some of them are getting mad and thought that I was avoiding them. This period actually brings me some peace of mind. I was probably one of those people who are really into chatting and I just accept whoever would contact me or request me to be their chatmate. I've met all kinds of people and some of them, I would say are pervert enough to show themselves in most undesirable situations. For those who are on chatting or at least have some experience in communicating online, you would know what I meant. During this period, I promised myself that from then on, I would only go online and chat with my legitimate friends and I would say that they are only a few of them. For these past 3 weeks, all I did was just open my Yahoo Messenger, check if any of my "legit" friends are online and chat with them, if none of them are online, I would just leave an offline message for them and then logoff. My legit friends in Yahoo knows how to get in touch with me even if I'm not online and away from my computer. If you are one of them, you should have no problem at all to check out on me.
Although I have other friends outside of Yahoo Messenger and we communicate with each other through emails and text messaging.
So, is this what I call "normal"???

Mother's Day

I spent Mother's Day (May 11th) wth my mother, of course. I usually go out with my friends on my days off but this time, I made sure that I spent the day with my parents. In the previous years, I usually buy show tickets for my parents to watch. Last year I let them watch Mama Mia!, a broadway show here in Mandalay Bay Resort Hotel. This year, I just brought them out for late lunch. We went to Bayside Buffet in Mandalay Bay Hotel and had our usual long stay in a restaurant whenever we go to a buffet. Since we went there late, it was almost dinner already. They were serving food for dinner so there were a lot of seafood galore. We also had champagne with the food. This is how we usually celebrate Mother's Day and this is my way of honoring and thanking my mom for being the best mother that I could ever have.

Its typical for us Pinoys that we rarely express vocally our love to our family and loved ones. Unlike here in America where saying good byes to your mother or father, sister or brother, the expression of "I love you" is always included. So, given that fact, I always show my appreciation, respect and love to my parents in the form of gifts, buying them lunch or dinner, letting them watch a show or just by staying with them on their special day.

Too Busy For Comfort

Its been a busy week in my workplace. On top of that, one of my fellow techincians have some family crisis that she needs to attend to during day time for the next 3 weeks. In order to accommodate her request, I have to move around our schedules. I have changed my schedule temporarily from Tuesdays through Saturdays and I'd be off from Saturday through Monday for the next 3 weeks. I also have to pull out the other techincian from graveyard shift and let her work on day shift to replace the other technician in question. While the other technician with the problem will have to work at nights from Saturday through Monday, in this way she could attend to her personal business during the day.
I just hope that everything would be okay for her and the crisis that she is in will be resolved.

Comparisons

Me and my family are practicing Catholics. Even back in out home country, the Philippines, we'd make sure that we hear Holy Mass every Sunday. Here in Las Vegas, we hear Mass as much as we can, considering that I have work on Saturday evenings so I spend the whole day of Sunday in my bed. We normally hear mass at Our Lady of Las Vegas Catholic Church every 6:30 PM. There is something special about this schedule, they always hold a Filipino mass on this time. All the songs are in Pilipino or Tagalog although there are a few that are in English. In order to be understood by the mixed crowd of churchgoers, the priest has to conduct the mass in English.

There are several instances that Filipino priests come to visit and officiate the mass much to the delight of mostly Filipino parishioners. This is where one could compare between a white or caucasian priest and a Pinoy priest in terms of offiating the mass. I myself could notice during the sermon where these "white" priests tend to read in delivering their sermon whereas these Pinoy priests, specially those newly arrived direct from the Philippines, they tend to just speak without using any draft at all. It seems that these Pinoy priests share the gospel from their heart while the "other" priests are not sincere enough in delivering their sermons.

Although it seems you can see the difference, the bottomline is how the parishioners absorbed the sermon. Those priests who were just reading their sermons, although seems not sincere, actually delivered the gospel and share it to the people with all their hearts put into it. They probably use some kind of aid while they talk in order to deliver the thought and the true message of the gospel in a more understandable and efficient way. In either way, the ultimate goal is to share the teachings of God. Priests are just the instrument of God to bring the good news to all the people and because they are still human, they are not perfect in some ways also.

So the next time I hear mass, I'd focus more on the good message the officiating priest tried to convey and not on their individual style in delivering such message.