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You are here: Home / Archives for newsfeed

“Breaking News: NSA Hacks Reynolds Wrap, Tinfoil Hat Will No Longer Will Protect You”

January 12, 2014 by Iskra 1 Comment

Pandora
Pandora, charcoal dust and digital modification © Iskra Johnson

                  “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” –Brené Brown

This Friday I went out to my neighborhood bar to celebrate the first week of the new year. I took my journal and my favorite pen and my phone, and sat next to another person dining solo. She had her phone propped up on her martini glass and never raised her eyes from it, even as she consumed her dinner and dessert and a second martini. I thought about how if she had a book at hand it would be the most natural thing in the world to ask her what she was reading, or to say, I’ve read that, it was great, even if I had no idea what the book was. And yet for a long time, though our elbows were four inches apart, I felt compelled to observe the mores of Seattle social etiquette: the closer you are to a stranger, the less you say.

Finally I could not resist my curiosity, and I asked if she was reading the news. This compelled her to raise her eyes and to list off her news feed, which included all the mainstream media plus “Mumbai, for some reason. My favorite is the BBC, I trust them.” I asked her if she ever read the indie news sources like Truthout or Common Dreams and she pursed her lips and shook her head.”I would never read something like that.” Conversation over. A few minutes later she raised her head again and reported, “Arkansas Lieutenant Governor accused of misconduct,” and went back to chewing her fries with aioli.

As the daughter of a newspaper publisher and a political activist, I will be the first to acknowledge an abject obsession with news, the worse the better. Trying to reconcile the big world and the little world, to parse the truth and find some meaning in making art in the middle of the apocalyptic mediafeed is a constant daily activity around here, which if you follow this blog you have read about before (sorry!). As part of my New Years resolutions I had vowed to be more mindful of what it does to my brain to allow the news in unfiltered, and to have perhaps a little more choice (hah!). On Friday as I browsed my phone in chastened silence and waited for dinner I came across a link on Facebook to Brené Brown’s brilliant Ted Talk about Vulnerability. Which of course made me think immediately about the NSA and the comment from our President after the first set of leaks to the effect that “perhaps some way would be found to work on encryption to make data safe.” Which was followed shortly by a new set of leaks about how yes, in fact the NSA was developing backdoor ways to un-encrypt private data to make it safe for the NSA to read our private mail at its leisure.

In other words, we are now all vulnerable all the time. According to Brené “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change,” but I am not quite sure this is what she had in mind.

A few hops and skips led me to a truly outlier independent news source that mentioned casually that soon drones the size of fleas will be able to see into our homes and hear what we are saying. Sigh, there goes pillow talk. Pick the strangest science fiction you find, and soon we will be living in it. Really, I just want to go back to “normal.” I so wish we could shut the box of hysteria unleashed after 9.11 and confine eavesdropping to the secret lives of plants.

There is always a flower in Pandora’s box, and the key to smelling its scent is, yes, vulnerability. It is raining here in Seattle, and spring is soon to come. There are good things. And if anybody is listening in, that’s all you’re going to hear today. “There are good things, there are good things……..”

Flower Drawing
Origins of Spring, powdered pigment and graphite on paper © Iskra Johnson

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Brene Brown, eaves dropping, flower drawing, New Years Resolution, newsfeed, NSA, Pandora Drawings, there are good things

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I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.
A time and memory experiment. Photography captures A time and memory experiment. Photography captures a moment in light. You put the moment away for 30 years, lose the album several times, and then it resurfaces, the old analog print in perfect form. What happens if the small print is then scanned and enlarged? And revisited as the half-forgotten? This image from Koyasan was printed small in the first run and did not look like much of anything. On 17 x 22 it is lovely, and at full size of 24 x 36 it is something else altogether. Unlike enlargements of digital photographs analog images are simply soft, without the artifacts of pixel interpolation. How curious that what was originally 4x6 looks best at least 400% larger.

Photography is such a powerful tool to explore memory and what it means to forget and remember. The idea that we must live authentically in the “Now” (or that there IS a “now” unfiltered by the past) is perplexing for a meaning seeker. I always have a memory, no matter how small and distant, crumpled in my back pocket. Perhaps like homeopathic tinctures the smaller the memory the more space it can fill.

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