Picture above – The New Dawn
Julie Mehretu
(A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory)
Images crowd our minds, thoughts scramble . . .
This overload of information you use multilayered
to blot out story, our words, thoughts, judgement . . .
we are left with the blur . . .sweeping lines,
shapes, stencils, that disrupt and interweave
within the frame
Where is space
in this world for the soul?
Shadows mingle on the hanging canvass
each viewer a presence, smudged, smothered,
each of us shading the overlay.
Image after image is transformed –
morphs into the abstract
Where is space
in this world for the soul to roam?.
Images crowd in to be our burden – Californian fires,
flames, firestorm, Grenfell Tower torching sky-
humans, ethnic cleansing, Rohingya conflict,
trail of black ash, the Burning Bush that consumes.
Image after image
Where is space
in this world for the soul to be free?.
You overlay, overlay to transform.
Blurred towards abstraction. Each physical event
experienced and now you remind us this is not us ,
this is not our world. Even as I step close
in search of a bird, a feather, even wisp of a wing
Where is space
in this world for the soul to fly?
Before the canvass titled New Dawn I weep.
Darkening, with pace of time, race for information
what do we know? What have we done?
Our tiny ones have only a small place
of gold horizon to be born and spread their wings.
Where is space
in in this crowded noisy shattered world?
Is it you who give us the space within, no words
of containment, no pidgin-holing of our being, no longer
reduced to body, skin, national identity
rather a trajectory for a more complex way
to imagine a better world. In this motion
are we on the verge of collapse or the brink of transition?
A space where our soul
can breathe and love again.
There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in.
It’s overwhelming. . .the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.
I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate
these complexieites and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place – Julie Mehretu
