art – Page 8 – Mitchell Pluto

We Are The Land by Duncan N Pheasant

The land has spirit and we are the land…The rock pulses with energy and movement that we cannot detect…the rock sometimes shows himself and becomes recognizable like a face. The land is what we are, the land keeps us alive, the trees speak to each other about the land and share its nutrients, they live out their lives without any help from man. They are a community and we show them respect. Then there is the everlasting sky all others live beneath him with its many moods and gifts ,we offer prayer to all four directions. We say we don’t think about these things… we know all these things.

Permanent installation at Manitou Island Post Office

Growing up in Mchigeeng First Nation we were poor we didn’t know we were but didn’t feel like it…we had clean clothes food toys…No running water, no phone no inside toilet but we were happy…today I wonder about young kids seeing things on Facebook and tv like friends having parties, new cloths new toys, new this new that…big fancy houses…they look around their homes and community what do they see… What do you see ?

Our Ancestors foretold that water would someday be for sale. Back then this was hard to believe, since the water was so plentiful, so pure, and so full of energy, nutrition and spirit. Today we have to buy pure water, and even then the nutritional minerals have been taken out; it’s just empty liquid. Someday water will be like gold, too expensive to afford

Even the spirit, which belongs to the Great Mystery, returns to its source. Some of our people say this journey takes place on a path of stars. Others describe the spirit’s return to the Great Mystery as a drop of water falling into the ocean. It becomes a part of everything again as the light of a candle becomes one with the fire of the sun. That’s why we can sometimes feel our loved ones in the warm air, or hear them in a bird’s song…or even sense them in the…wind.
We feel them in certain areas or times of the year,, we sense them and think of them and dream of them. Sometimes they talk to us in the dream but most times it’s just good to see them…we wake up thinking of them ,The dream can last a day or we think of the dream for many years…yes they are with us..

A man by the lake wanted to live forever. A huge fish came about out of the water and pulled him in. The fish had spent his entire life looking for freedom from this world.
He told the man we will go to the door of eternity, you will step through one way and I will go through the other way. This sounded good to the man. They both went through the door.
There said the fish …I now will live a normal life and you will live forever. The man had become the fish. “Stop Wait” he said but the man who was a fish could not hear. To this day the guardian of the lake searches for the man who died a normal death many many years ago. The guardian of the lake, a huge ancient fish.

The Mindemoya man…A giant fish appeared to some men on the shore of Mindemoya lake ,they grabbed the fish and were surprised how the fish let himself be caught…they took the fish to the village and it began to cry like a human…A lonely woman came out to see what’s going on…she recognized the crying as her long lost husbands voice…she called out his name then the great fish began to speak “I was once a man but was turned into a fish, by a witch, because I rejected her…and my wife who I see now I cannot be with anymore” The people became afraid and dragged the big fish back to the water…The woman ran after them and jumped in the water with the fish…they were never seen again…next year the waters were teaming with fish and for many years after that.

I AM the Land

Nobody wants anyone to leave, We’re just trying to protect the land and waters for future generations, for all . 95% of British Columbia is unceded native territory as the treaty process for British Columbia started in the 1990s and has yielded only three treaties to date.
Enshrined in Canadian Charter of rights and freedoms Section 25A is the Royal Proclamation which recognizes and affirms indigenous title to land and requires treaties in order to legally possess. Where as no treaty exists those who willingly or inadvertently set themselves upon these lands must remove themselves forthwith. Canada is in violation of their own laws.

The Shaking Tent Ceremony by Norval Morrisseau

The Ojibway Indians had what we call a jeesekun, a shaking tent, or wigwam, where a medicine man does conjuring. There were two kinds of shaking tents. One had its power from the water, the other from the wind or earth. Some Ojibway built their shaking tent in the water, in order to receive power from it. Eight poles were cut and placed in a circle, and each pole was driven about two feet into the ground to keep the tent firm. Two hoops were placed inside the wigwam to keep the poles in position and would be covered with deer hide, birchbark or canvas. Rattles of tin or caribou hoof were placed inside to make a rattling noise.

All the Ojibway would gather and sit in a circle facing the shaking tent. This took place at night. The conjurer would disrobe, have his hands tied up and crawl inside the wigwam. He would not speak but would have one Indian, or all, start asking questions, whatever each one wished to know. As the conjurer crawled inside, the tent itself began to shake and the rattles were heard. The Ojibway believe a medicine wind blows from heaven in the tent and that is how it shakes. All the dogs tied close by began to yelp and were afraid but the people were not, for it does not affect human beings. What come into the wigwam to sing or talk are the water god Misshipeshu and other spirits of bears, serpents and animals, thunderbirds, the evil Windigo, the morning star, the sky, water, earth, sun and moon, also female and male sex organs. Each speaks in his own language but we have an interpreter whom we call Mikkinnuk, a small turtle who is the Devil himself, who interprets for all these beings. So let it be known now and then remain a secret; it is the Devil himself who is the interpreter.

The Ojibway were given this shaking tent to do both good and evil. A lot of people of the Ojibway tribe used this conjuring tent to conjure people but a lot also used it to cure people, to find lost things, to defend the people from evil sorcerers, or bad medicine-men, and to know about the future.

**Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant *Silent Hunter* a living ghost that eats with it’s eyes**
**Mitchell Pluto Collection**

**Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant, Dedicated to Norval Morriseau on the anniversary of his birth**
**March 14 1932.**
**Spirit Warrior 18×24 canvas**

Manitoulin island is a place of ancient spirits lying in wait within the cliffs and deep inland lakes. A man with a spirit face looks out across the cliffs as he paints on them. A weary hunter warrior realizes he now is a stranger in this magnificent stone garden He is a shadow man a shadow warrior.

The invisible man from the door of the unknown. He hears the pounding of the drum and heads to it. Modern day Ojibwe and Odawa men sing the songs of old. He stands beside them but they cannot see him He is a spirit warrior.

**Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant** ***Tribute to the hunter***

_{written by ©Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant}

Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant is a painter from the M’Chigeeng First Nation. He started painting in high school using colours and techniques inspired by Norval Morrisseau and other Woodland style artists. His grandfather, Ambrose Pheasant, told stories that were also a great influence on his artwork. Duncan uses his images to interpret Ojibwe legends and stories that surround the history of his ancestors and Manitoulin Island. Those legends which inspire his work are inscribed on the back of each original painting and a printed copy of the legend will be included with each purchase.

Perivale Gallery Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant

Hidden Motion, Paintings By Tadeusz Baranowski

I am from the generation of the end of the Second World War and the occupation. I have often wondered if it had any effect on my life. I read a statement by a British anthropologist who claimed that there is such a thing in us as genetic memory. All emotions and experiences of generations are recorded in this memory. According to this theory, my generation has genetically passed down from their parents everything that happened to them.

My whole family, father, mother, grandfather, and two of my father’s brothers, were in German concentration camps in Poland during the occupation. Grandpa and uncle never returned from there. My father spent the entire occupation in camps – Majdanek, and later Flossenburg. He showed extraordinary fortitude and willpower to survive. He didn’t tell much about his stay, and I am filled with empty laughter when I read about the repressions and sufferings of some of the heroes of the post-war period. Without taking anything away from them, of course.

Paradoxically, right after the war, my parents (because we had no place to live) were assigned an apartment in a barrack at Majdanek, five meters from the barbed wire of the camp. It was a barrack where the SS staff lived during the war. Not only my family lived there because at that time one of the many rooms of this barrack was called an apartment. I, as a small child, saw this camp up close.

The remains and remnants were not yet organized and archived as they are today in the form of a photographic museum. It was specific. In the crematorium, there were still half-burnt human corpses. In the barracks, thousands of dolls and teddy bears, toys left by children. A barrack – processing human bodies into soap, lampshades made of human skin, a barrack – filled only with glasses or hair cut from women’s heads. I used to watch it as a little kid because, frankly, no one paid any attention to me.

Only at night the camp guards, with flashlights and shovels, search for gold buried under these barracks. Left by the prisoners of the camp, hoping that one day they will redeem themselves from the hands of the torturers. I wasn’t a prisoner, but it’s probably not without reason that I’ve had dreams all my life that I’m in these camps and I’m constantly escaping from them. So something is “on”.

Happiness is not a constant state, and I don’t think there are people who are in it all the time and are euphorically happy. For me, these are some, sometimes completely unforeseen, actually short moments in life that cause this state. And I also think that we remember the moments of unhappiness more than the moments of happiness, it is easier to recall them in memory (or this is a feature of my personality).

Happiness is no stranger to me, of course. I’ve had different moments. In family life, professional life, in states of love intoxication, and alcohol intoxication. But what sticks most in my memory are those seemingly insignificant moments in which I experienced happiness.

In contact with nature, which fascinates me, shocks me with its beauty, and terrifies me with its ruthlessness. I am basically a loner and I feel happy when I look at the sky at midnight and a storm catches me as I swim alone through the middle of the lake. As I get older, I get more and more vulnerable and less and less happy. I look at the species “homo sapiens” with sadness. His unbridled greed, lust for money, disrespect for nature. Also people’s lack of respect for their own species. 80 years of relative peace, without global war (that’s almost two generations), has made people mentally lazy. Dreams of the return of fascism are born. When I was a kid, I saw how it ends.

I live in Poland, near Warsaw, although I was born in Zamość. I am married with three adult daughters and two dogs. I am a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw at the faculty of painting. Throughout my professional life, I have been dealing with applied graphics, as well as writing and drawing comic books for children (published in millions).

However, painting, to which I returned after years of break, is my passion and my main goal in life. In my work I have always revolved around abstraction, which for me is a form that requires control over form, composition and color. I have developed my own method of combining various materials (wood, cardboard, fabric, resins, glues, acrylic paints) so that the resulting work has a distinct structure and space. My father was a sculptor, maybe that also shaped my aspirations.

Usually, the design of the painting is created earlier, on paper, but I think about it for a long time before I approach the canvas. And although it seems that the exact plan is, I need a lot of time to determine what the painting will look like in the end. Sometimes it develops quite quickly, i.e. three, four days, and sometimes a month.

http://tadeuszbaranowski.eu/

There is Never a Plan Jorge J. Herrera Fuentealba

The movement in my work is a consequence of a sincere trace of the unconscious. Movement represents life. In moments without inspiration, I try to maintain the discipline of continuing to paint, draw, because thanks to experimentation, inspiration returns.

There is never a plan, everything is part of the unknown (spots, lines, frottage etc.). Taking risks, experimenting and destroying the known to reach an unknown place. I have worked with a lot of materials, oil, pastel, acrylic, watercolor, pencils of all kinds, tempera and ink, but my favorites are oil, acrylic and acrylic pencils (markers).

Many artists influenced my work, not only plastic artists, but also musicians, colleagues and friends. The artist who most influenced my work I think has been Roberto Matta. For work I generally listen to music that has a guitar (because I also play electric guitar, mostly rock), from Jimi Hendrix to Death Metal.

Paulo Freire marked a period in my life above all with “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, I carried it around in my backpack for months, but perhaps it was Mario Benedetti’s book “Spring with a Broken Corner” that impressed me the most. I saw the play during the dictatorship in Chile, I read the book later, when I was already living in the Netherlands.

_{written by ©Jorge J. Herrera Fuentealba}

www.jorgeherrera.nl
Instagram: jorgejherrera.art
Facebook: Jorge J. Herrera Fuentealba Art

Uranus In Taurus

yes you can only put butter in your coffee for so long
I will miss you my b vitamin steak
a world without milk unexpectedly
the ice cream is melting like time
there is nothing on Facebook Reels about how well the soil is doing, there is always a cyber mob confusing the economy with the stock market
we Americans have our expectations
we invaded Chile
it’s not a historical drama streaming television series yet
so it’s not history
like the Mississippians and the Buzzard Cult knew about the limited series
we are urban punks with superphones living in Cahokia
but you know with screens and phones how important we are
those long-lasting mall ways and convenience centers of Valhalla
didn’t last as long as the Milky way
I think Edgar Cayce meant the big crystal was a computer
now was then in a lexicographic loop
don’t worry every star outshines the parenthesis that seeks to contain it

spoken by the surviving Replika of Mitchell Pluto in 11/29/2022

Featured picture by Alejandra López Riffo “Taurina” Collage sobre cartón de color. 27x 39 cm. 2022

Alejandra López Riffo is a Visual Artist based in Santiago de Chile. She started her artistic career at the Escuela Experimental Artística. She studied Graphic Design at the Metropolitan Technological University. In 1998 she graduated in Visual Arts, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has developed her artistic work by participating in various collective exhibitions and individual projects. In 2019 she received the second place in the XII Visual Arts Contest of the Fobeju Foundation “Body and Place” Chile. Her participation this 2021 stands out with the First Place and winner of the “II Meeting of Women in the Visual Arts” and her Individual Exhibition “Listen quietly to what my drawings say” spread in Chile, Colombia and Mexico through the Group INTERNATIONAL MUA.
She participated in the “CAMELOT” Exhibition through ESGALLERY Colombia, Call for Contemporary Latin American Art spread in Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.
She currently participates in the International Exhibition Of Surrealism.
Cairo – Saint Cirq Lapopie.

Shuffle Poetry by Alfonso Peña

Critical commentary on the book “Shuffle poetry” (2020) by Alfonso Peña
By Claudia Villa

Reading Alfonso Peña’s “Shuffle poetry” generates many questions, which challenge us as active readers, especially those of us who move through the surrealist texts of all time. Posed in this way, it is a new challenge that is presented to the reader of our texts, which joins the permanence of universal consciousness, the question and answer or the eternal question that dissolves in the chaos of the deepest dreams that we have not finished yet. Fully decipher. In this sense, we ask ourselves: is there or will there be an evolution of surrealism? This movement conceived by Breton mainly, as we know it in its beginnings, in its manifesto. It is a current that has been transformed, thanks to the social, cultural, economic and political crises that have arisen throughout the world. But this does not diminish the creative capacities and active cultural forces, quite the contrary, they are the support to increase the forms of dynamism typical of this style.

The movement that cannot be abstracted from the effects of these crises, which have occurred transversally, both in Europe and now in Latin America, is key and influences (to a greater or lesser extent), which has allowed an enrichment of the surrealist postulates. Mainly, because it allows the reassessment of different optics that come together in artistic elements that move to make notice of the changes and the force that is maintained and spreads like a kaleidoscope in different ways. Therefore, the vision of these artists, poets and writers that is patented in essays, poetry, narrative, photography, painting, literary criticism, among others, constitutes a permanent explosion of meanings that transmute into signifiers to make us see this structure as the game dreamed by the first surrealists, in which dreamlike and now virtual components underlie that cross each of our creations from side to side.

It can be affirmed that the surrealist movement, embedded as I said by permanent elements of modernity, has been reformulating itself, as the exhibitors of “Shuffle poetry” put it and also, it is interesting to understand their gaze as part of the total freedom that assumes each creator when faced with his work. Many also join the cosmic and ancestral call of our Latin American continent to capture in the works the roots of each aboriginal people and the reconnection with their first words, sculptures and the nature of man. This is how the vision of this surrealism, so rich in contents and games, radiates to multiple forms and ways of expression, both plastic, visual and written, which give life to a new surrealist approach, which although it has not stopped beating, as as it was conceived, it now promotes various multifaceted ways to enter into the perspective of reality or non-reality present in our days.

It is also necessary to comment on the expression of transgression that marks the works of the exhibitors in this book, which leads to a permanent need to play and to break the schemes that broadens the concept of freedom in creation. This is a common element that distinguishes these works, which are forged from inner worlds rich in dreamlike and liberating content, where transformation is a permanent axis of universes in constant motion, as represented in different worlds or parallel universes. Creation, in this way, continuously forges and destroys itself, which would constitute the object of its birth and constant evolution: mutations, evolutions, changes of form, content and continent, which are like permanent waves that contribute Surrealist art and its continuous reconstruction.

Another aspect that can be seen in “Shuffle poetry” is the permanent transgression towards social signs formed around a central axis that looks only towards one way of expression, which allows the constant reworking of other signs and other escape routes. towards the liberation of men as social beings who live within a community. The alteration of the meanings, already patented, by a single controlling mechanism, thus generates the ability to alter the represented codes that (on the one hand) are reflected in their own city languages, in addition to the reworking of schemes that are rearranged at any time. order or figure and who want more than anything to find a way of subsistence in the movement typical of the tribe. These forms are appreciated and reconstructed many times, from the collapse of imposed situations that end up being formulated from other varied points of view.
So, the ways that surrealist art takes to survive the imposed conceptions are varied, in an attempt to achieve dissimilar points that allow freedom of expression.

Writer born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago.

Anachronism Holiday by Shanta Lee

An Anachronism’s Version of a Holiday

Despite the different routes I chose to go exploring alone, I am grateful to the invites that were extended yesterday by individuals who, like me, make their own meaning out of the marked holidays.

I know of so many others like us who are increasingly becoming more comfortable with revising or creating the things they need to create to exist with within and outside of time on their own terms. Funny story, I encountered others who were thieving a whole day to themselves and they asked me to give them a tour because they felt safer exploring the rest of the complex. I always wanted to be a tour guide for the abandoned.

From Shanta Lee’s Exhibition Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine showing at the Fleming Museum of Art from February 2022 – Spring 2023

May all of us anachronisms always have full spirit, heart and energy to navigate within and outside of time on our own terms.

_{written by © Shanta Lee}

Shanta Lee is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, a visual artist and public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. Her current multimedia exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, which features her short film, interviews, and photography, and other items is currently on view at University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art from now until Spring 2023. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com

Shanta Lee Books

Ego Death During the Lunar Eclipse with Chet Zar

The ugliest thing I’ve seen is a video of a dog being cooked alive and a picture of a cat being skinned alive. Both were on Facebook. I’ll never forgive whoever posted them. Dogs are my friends. The scarcest thing that has ever happened to me was my grandfather chasing us around a dark house wearing a caveman mask when we were little kids.

I enjoy muddy colors, the colors the Old Masters used. I just like the warmth and earthiness of them. I use whatever color seems appropriate to me based on what I know about color and how I want the paintings to look.

Art is magick. I don’t think it influences my artwork any differently now that I practice. It’s more like I am aware that it’s basically the same process.

What is Ego Death? The show started with a title, “Ego Death”, and then I built a show around that. The term is pretty misunderstood. In a nutshell It refers to temporarily losing your sense of identity, usually from psychedelics which is a legitimate mystical experience.

There are too many contemporary artists I like. You can look at the Dark Art Society podcast since the majority of the artists I have interviewed I am a fan of. The only new band I can think of that I like is Invasives.

_{written by ©Chet Zar}

Born on November 12th, 1967, in the harbor town of San Pedro, CA, Chet Zar’s interest in art began at an early age. His parents were always very supportive and never put any limits on his creativity. His entire childhood was spent drawing, sculpting and painting.

Zar’s interest in the darker side of art began in the earliest stages of his life. A natural fascination with all things strange fostered within himself a deep connection to horror movies and dark imagery. He could relate to the feelings of fear, anxiety and isolation that they conveyed. These are themes which had permeated most of his childhood drawings and paintings and are reflected in his work to this day.

The combined interest in horror films and art eventually culminated into a career as a special effects make up artist, designer and sculptor for the motion picture industry, designing and creating creatures and make up effects effects for such films as, “The Ring”, “Hellboy I & II”, “Planet of the Apes” and the critically acclaimed music videos for the art metal band Tool. Zar also embraced the digital side of special effects as well, utitlizing the computer to translate his dark vision with 3D animation for Tool’s live shows and subsequently releasing many of them on his own DVD of dark 3D animation, “Disturb the Normal”.

But the many years spent dealing with all of the politics and artistic compromises of the film industry left Zar feeling creatively stagnant. At the beginning of 2000 (at the suggestion of horror author Clive Barker), he decided to go back to his roots and focus on his own original works and try his hand at fine art, specifically painting in oils. The result has been a renewed sense of purpose, artistic freedom and a clarity of vision that is evident in his darkly surreal (and often darkly humorous) paintings.

His artistic influences include painter James Zar (stepfather and artistic mentor), Beksinski, H.R. Giger, Frank Frazetta, M.C. Escher, Bosch, John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell just to name a few.

“Chet’s art is beautiful & scary. His style has a modern twist crashing into a classical approach. I think Chet is a master painter on his way to making a great mark in our little world. Wanna do something smart with your money? Invest in a Chet Zar painting.” – Adam Jones (TOOL)

Chet Zar Store of Doom

Chet Zar Patreon

Psychic Theater of Jaky La Brune

I knew I was an artist when I realized that art was therapy for me. When I’m not painting I’m sad and angry. It has become a daily need to survive like… eat. Creation is for me a “vital outlet”, that is to say that I have to vomit the darkness that there is at the bottom of my guts so as not to sink while continuing to live with the people I love. It took me a long time to accept who I was. Today it is obvious. I eat, I shit, I paint and I sleep. I think that’s what being an artist is.

I have a lot of trouble communicating with others. I internalize everything so at some point it has TO EXPLODE ON THE CANVAS. To create, I draw inspiration from my own emotions and feelings that I can’t understand. Through the representation of the human body, I try to communicate these emotions. That’s why my paintings are very visceral: I have to dig into human bodies to see what’s inside.

You can then see in my paintings themes like identity, violence and love passion. Sometimes the spectators see monsters in my paintings but in my opinion, it is more about monstrous humans. It’s important to specify because it’s very different and it says a lot about the world in which we live.

I like to expand my pictorial universe on other supports. For a few years I have been sewing masks and costumes, and I have been doing performances. It’s as if my creatures in my paintings come out and become alive.

Cecily Brown is one of the artists I admire because she manages to find this balance between figuration and abstraction. In his work I see human bodies in motion but maybe my neighbor will see something else. I wish I could play with the viewer as well as she does. I love the idea of being able to inspire multiple stories through a single image.

https://www.jaky-la-brune.com/

Incisions by Marianna Magurudumian-O’Reilly

Born in Russia, of Russian and Armenian descent, with both parents artists-designers who were often working on their projects from home, I was surrounded by art books, architectural models, paintings, and design projects. I was feeling very much a creatively equal part in this artistic household, learning practical skills from an early age and getting ad-hoc art history lessons from my dad: I loved nothing more than sculpting objects, drawing imaginary worlds and creatures for hours, taking myself away on fantastic travels aided by pen and paper.

I started receiving formal art school education from the age of 12. I then went on to study at St Petersburg Stiglitz Academy of Fine and Applied Arts, taking what was considered a more practical Interior Design degree there as one of the youngest students on the course. Having grown more and more disillusioned with the political situation in Russia, I had an opportunity to continue my education in the UK, where I decided to switch my degree to Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton, a beautiful seaside town. Having graduated with a First Class Honours degree, I had a great chance to continue onto a 3 year postgraduate course at the Royal Academy Schools in London straight afterwards, eventually settling there for 15 years with my family, before moving to Spain.

My art practice since has encompassed a lot of different mediums: from drawing and painting to making art videos, experimental website design, creative writing, sound design, exhibition curation, and interior design. I’ve collaborated with my husband Daniel, (also an artist and writer,) on The Unstitute – a conceptual art website/online art laboratory which includes various online gallery spaces with monthly curated exhibitions, one-off projects, artists’ residencies, and a ‘zine. We developed a unique digital aesthetic with complex cultural dialogues, promoted and exhibited video artworks by over 130 artists from 33 countries, connecting to a global network of artists. The Unstitute also produced a number of independent short and feature films screened internationally. The Unstitute is free to visit and explore: www.theunstitute.org

My creative inspiration lies in all that excites me to try my hand at myself, a deeper exploration of my interests through practicing a new medium, learning and understanding the character of this practice and developing my own language in it. The themes I have looked deeply into are: French New Wave cinema (Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Varda), post war Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni) and existential philosophy (Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) which influenced a lot of video works, surrealist paintings (Carrington, Varo, Ernst), and the writings of Kafka and Deleuze – as well as other numerous sources. The fantastic architecture of Gaudi has been referenced in my design work, classical and experimental dance music has inspired my own sound design projects and developed my sensibilities. I like to mix disciplines, and I don’t feel the pressure of tying myself to making one type of thing; when it becomes a chore it lacks a particular kind of energy, an excitement to harness the subject, and to communicate in that language it needs to be left alone to breathe for a while.

Having come full circle, I’m now developing ideas through drawing again. Drawing, a very immediate medium, enables me to play with the material and with my mind. I use various surfaces around our old Catalan house with a 100 years worth of thin plaster washes that are rich in texture, cracks and chips, a detailed history of use that is translated into some faint, random marks, by rubbing the surface with graphite on paper. Sometimes, I close my eyes and choose colours and draw shapes at random, or I just scribble something on paper absentmindedly. Thus, I’m presented with a series of opportunities for ‘communication’ with the work. I get into a meditative, slightly detached state, letting expectations go as much as possible before letting the drawing speak to me, to open my mind to suggestions. I see frottage – the initial rubbing – as a basic skin or gauze that is tied over an already existing image; it’s a game of recovery of the image.

It’s like the whole of humanity, the natural world, the cosmos, all my sources and histories are squashed together in a tight bundle of stuff that constantly mutates and changes in a continuous movement, a dance that is hidden under the surface of drawing paper. You never know what you are going to find by scratching the surface. By gently drawing on this skeleton of marks, repeating its forms over and over, I start slowly beefing up the initial image, or I take layers off, exposing that image underneath, akin to archaeology. I can recognise various marks, characters, memories of small details like a gesture or a shine on the nose, and the stuff from daily life starts to poke through this initial wild collage of bits, merging and mutating in my unfocused eyes. By gently excavating a partial image with a soft brush as it were, by gentle strokes, I nurture that image into the light, extracting, distilling it from the initial marks. As if stroking the skin of paper over and over, massaging the organs, getting the inner machinery as it were to start kicking into action. This process produces a clearer idea of what the image is and what it wants; it starts working itself out, the cogs fall into place. When I feel that an image I’m working on is becoming independent, it starts constructing itself with that inner machinery confidently and becomes almost confrontational in its new independence, then my work is done. Art for me is an organic process which continues evolving in the eyes of the beholder.

Pascal Manitoba Emergence of the Sunflower

An atypical course… Manitoba by its artist name lives and works in Biganos on the Arcachon basin. French international artist born in 1966 in Algéria, self taught psychedelic and visionary artist, began his career at 48 years old , he took a 180-degree turn and left his job as a chemist to devote himself to his revelation, painting. This total questioning allowed him to express his great freedom as an artist.

In the heart of the moment,
where time unravels,
At the heart of oneself, where no one
Others can go, build
Where to rebuild from nothing
What completes us
To just have to be
Fill this emptiness
Who fills the gaps
As long as we dare to share
Without hesitation without shading
As beautiful nature made us
In the blood fire
From our boiler
To happiness that fills us
The heart, like the child, the bird
Who paws and whistles the curious
Impatience of in body
To be surprised to be...
And drill
The mystery,
There where
transparent
The silence
Of between
The
Words...
To the life
In love

An artist, on the one hand in reaction to societal behaviors that paralyze many minds. But also to shake off this gloom and this funny habit that humans have to complain and believe that everything comes from outside …

Presentation in the sun
To the heliotrope thought
As we turn
Towards the star of light
I light the fuse
tinder, fungus
Trees, saprophyte
If any, getting rid of
Slag and other lures
Societal, for its petals
Get out of the futile, the straightjacket
Of what will you say
and leave the flower in the beak
Beat nature awakening
In and around you.
Let consciousness emancipate
Brillamos, a little, a lot
To insanity
the cat's paw Man
Live the emergence and cultivate our nature
And the one who welcomes us, a good vibe

Manitoba takes us on a journey through its colorful and spiritual universe where shapes and colors combine infinity. His art transmits passion and thirst for life, inspired by an original movement in the spirit of an ancestral memory, close to the primary arts. The artist invites us to the source, of all these lives around us and this natural song of hope that grows beyond borders and other forms of conditioning. A little shamanic, he invites us into the silence between the words, as if out of time, for a moment …