New York Station (version 1)

I’m filling a national need here by overwhelming you with visual clutter. Since I’m an American in this current lifetime, I can’t help but let my artistic sensibilities express contemporary perceptions, imbalances, desires, dreams, and lacks in America’s collective unconscious. Of course, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can take a slice out of American pie and help you take a bite out of it with your eyes.

This piece is actually inspired by a pal on Twitter of mine who is a remarkable poet, and the song by The Velvet Underground called Rock and Roll. Rus Khomutoff, on Twitter, sometimes sends me links online of radio stations in New York because he’s from Brooklyn. I’ve never been to New York myself, but I sometimes think my vibe would jive well with certain scenes, cafes, dance clubs, music stores, galleries, and bookstores there.

This piece has also hints of Japan’s Rising Sun flag. Recently, President Obama made an official apology to Japan for the United States’ annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the end of world war two. Washington and Wall Street helped to industrialize Japan after world war two, and I think that the mechanical engine parts represented in this piece are symbolic of that.

Another association that comes to mind is Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses album, and how its front cover has sound megaphones attached to a pole on a landscape. Is it dawn or dusk in that image by Martyn Atkins? If it is indeed dawn, then that’s just one more link to Japan’s Rising Sun flag.

A pastime ritual of some Americans is collecting things, from coins, to stamps, to all kinds of retro and antique objects. I think this piece helps to convey that sense. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, my grandmother clung to a tendency to hold on to things, even items of trash. In my six year stay with her and my parents on our family farm, I started using some of that trash, media, and old materials from the past for art projects.

The need to have things together, to have enough to survive, and to be able to be within reach of necessities come to mind. Unconsciously, if many Americans could, they’d probably grab every other nation on the planet and pull them close to the United States for close monitoring and access to resources. The word arthropod transverses the middle of this illustration, indicating an organism, such as an insect, that uses feet, limbs, and joints to walk, thus implying the need to walk across water as an act of faith to touch other things and organisms.

My work here is part of a larger series called Mechanical Organisms, which is part of the overarching Micro-Chimerisms project that continues to be ongoing in the Art of eVan repertoire.