INDIVISIBLE ?

INDIVISIBLE ?

By Tom Wachunas

   It’s still hurricane season. It will remain hurricane season long after its official meteorological end. Volatile storms of ideological conflicts will continue to afflict us, leaving us powerless and floundering in the vast, ever growing debris fields of our spiritual malaise.

    Questions blowin’ in the wind. A rare urge, or surge, this – to share with you, on this platform of ARTWACH, some considerations of my art for a change.

   Above, you see three paintings. At the top, “The Untied State of America,” made just a few weeks ago. Next, “Broken English Readymade,” from 2016. And at the bottom, “The United State of McMerica,” from 2010. Seems I’ve been developing a series. Maybe. “Political” art? That’s too easy and convenient a descriptor. Try ‘spiritual exercises,’ or ‘meditations,’ or even prayers.  The pleas, the please, of a wounded heart. An S.O.S. – Save Our Soul.

   …One nation, under God?

   The American flag, abstracted on grocery bags. Grocery bags – containers of consumables, sustenance, nutrients, sanitation necessities. Grocery bags – containers for disposables, things unwanted, trash. White stripes scratched with letters. Detached syllables. Words and phrases once familiar, now fragmented, foreign, fraught. 

   What do we stand for, and when? In whose presence? Untied, we kneel. The American Scream. Forgive us, Father, for we know not what we do.