[NOTE: This was before I added them to the existing series so new feedback can focus on these. If you've not seen the earlier set, you might want to look at them first. The artist statement there is similar to here.] "What Have You Done To The Earth?" In darkness I wander woods using lights to accent illusions from liminal visions. Now, from “Vibrant Night,” my light-painted meta-series (of subseries), I’ll show what I shot but kept in the dark: Abstract beings that are metaphors of my feeling that our treatment of nature – and even each other – can be “life out of balance” (which is from the Native American Hopi word “Koyaanisqatsi” and shown by the famous film of that name.) My title came from a song stanza in “When the Music’s Over” by a rock-poet of the 60’s, Jim Morrison and his group, The Doors: What have they done to the Earth? / What have they done to our fair sister? / Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her / Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn / Tied her with fences and dragged her down! These words bespeak his belief that a deceased American Indian’s soul had inhabited him. Their anger burns. Read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (Brown, 1970), “The Earth is Weeping” (Cozzens, 2016), and works by activist/historian Dunbar-Ortiz to see why (eg, brutal settler colonialism, genocidal acts, greed, corruption, arrogance – or even good intentions gone wrong.) Life out of balance! [NOTE on my method]: For this or any of my work involving pareidolia [an illusion like seeing shapes in clouds], I do not composite-in or digitally draw features onto the subject that weren't there. I must see the pareidolic illusion myself (usually by a normal light in the dark) and then use selective light painting during exposure followed by further refining tone and color in post-processing to better convey the illusion.]
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