ARTISTS' CO-OP OF MENDOCINO
  • Welcome !
  • Artists
    • Monthly Sampler
    • Photography >
      • Shanti Balsé
      • Sharon Garner
      • Pat Toth-Smith
    • Painting, Printmaking, Drawing, Multimedia >
      • Mary T. Anderson
      • Shanti Benoit
      • Karen Bowers
      • Laura Corben
      • David L. Cross
      • Joseph DuVivier
      • Stephen Garner
      • Debra Lennox
      • Karen Embree Reynolds
      • Robert Spies
      • Lynne Whiting
      • Robert Yelland (paintings)
      • Lynne Zickerman Olson
    • Jewelry, Sculpture, Ceramics, other 3D Art >
      • Jim Cowles
      • Maralee Greene (ceramics)
      • Robert Spies Sculpture
      • Robert Yelland (jewelry)
    • Guest Artists >
      • Lynne Butler (Ceramics)
      • Sev Ickes (Joyous Scenes)
      • Wendell Rickon (Upcycle Woodwork)
      • Robert Spies Sculpture
  • About Us
    • Find and Contact Us
    • Information, Calendar, Kudo
  • Exhibitions
    • Current Featured Artist
    • Online Exhibitions >
      • Selected Conundrums
      • Ekphrasis IX 2020 Exhibition
      • Ekphrasis XII 2023 Exhibition
      • Ekphrasis X 2021 Exhibition
      • Heart and Flowers
      • Ekphrasis XI 2022 Exhibition >
        • Marine Mendocino
        • Transitions
        • Collaborative Collages
      • Ekphrasis XIII 2024 Exhibition
  • ArtNotes
Ekphrasis X 2021 Virtual Exhibition
SET 3. Visual Artist Initiators and Writer Responders, cont.

H. SHARON GARNER, Hat, Chair, and Window, photograph. Response by poet ELIZABETH VRENIOS: Your Hat Still on the Chair.
I. DAVE FLAIM AND SARAH WAGNER, Radiolarian,  ​photomicrograph. Response by poet JONATON PAZER: Radiolarian.
J. SHANTI BENOIT and SEV ICKES,  The First Star, collage. Response by author Nancy Wallace Nelson: Velvet Green Ulva.
Intro Page   Set 1   Set 2   Set 4   Set 5   Set 6   Afterword
Initiating artist SHARON GARNER:   Hat, Chair, and Window​, photograph.
​
Picture
"
A note from the responding poet: 
​ I was delighted the first moment I saw this photograph. It spoke volumes with such an intensity that I felt as if it was a poem in itself.  The  bars of dark and light entering the picture through the curtains and across the room, through the ornate chair culminating on the hat image, all provocative and inventive.  The picture already tells a story that I felt I could respond to, and the image urged me to speak to the reasons that the hat was left on the chair.  The artist presented  a broad palate of images that allowed me to speak to the amazing ideas behind the photo."
E K-V.
C
 

​Your Hat, Still on the Chair 

 by responding poet,
ELIZABETH KIRKPATRICK-VRENIOS

when our room was as numinous 
as words,                                                                                                                                             
when we yearned for the future­­, 
 
that burned in the air,
there were moments 
we didn’t see the darkening gold of the past 
 
that stole through the curtains
casting a barred shadow on the chair.
You and I, distracted from the truth 
 
of silence, didn’t realize the setting sun 
weighed more than the horizon  
or that cardboard devils 
 
were everywhere. 
Even the angels turned their backs 
to us. Lies we buried burst wordlessly 
 
into the approaching dusk. You moved
forward without me, I knew you would.
I asked you to.
 
 
 

Initiating artists SARAH C. WAGNER and DAVID FLAIM Multilocular Radiolarian,  ​photomicrograph. 
Picture

​Radiolarian by responding poet JONATHAN PAZER

She hung in the trusses
dispassionately, champagne 
still clinging to her side.
 
Christened Radiolarian--
an inspired name for this ship.
A wild and cosmic inversion
of the scale of our ambitions.
 
Also a fine warning. Be careful                       
who you call infinitesimal.                             
 
We are like a tiny, microscopic 
sea creature that awakens to contemplate all the seven 
seas of Earth. 
 
The once transcendent wonder 
of those seven,
seven times vast to the mariner’s 
earthbound eyes, now a quaint notion,  
easily dispelled from orbit.
 
One world. One 
world ocean—bounded,
finite. A thin
delicate coating of life that sheaths 
our rocky, water planet,
traversable,
knowable,
home.
 


​

​Radiolarian swallowed again and again, 

stuffed with cargo, supplies and sailors.
Then she was full, and we made ready 
to slip the clamps of port. 
 
Cocooned in their berths
the boldest crew: accountants,
milliners, baristas, astrogators... called 
to serve aboard this city that takes flight.
 
Cloistered within her insulated flanks,
pocked by acre-wide portholes, 
now all luminous with promises,
kissed ever so lightly by time,
we scream through the white, 
featureless, alternate infinity 
of hyperspace.
 
                                    *      *      *
A single mote of dust,
back home in my living room, 
shimmering in the late afternoon sun, 
as compared to earth,
 
is incomprehensibly larger 
than this great vessel, 
set off 
against the infinite expanse 
of our own, specific universe, 
     the one 
           into which
                we have
                     this day
                            set forth.                                
​
Poet's  comment:
A Radiolarian is a tiny microscopic sea creature that is among the greater class of zooplankton and more specifically it is a protozoan with an intricate silica-based shell or skeleton. These come in a very wide variety of shapes. They are predatory and eat other things smaller than them…
As for the poem, as soon as I first saw the image, my mind went immediately to the white void that surrounded it and the fact that the object had no identifiable scale. Even though I could guess that it was something small, it still took me to the place of imagination where the scale might not be what was expected.
As soon as I thought of it as big, it immediately popped into my head that it was not in “ordinary space” and that it could be in hyperspace. So the mission of the poem was born.   - JP

 SHANTI BENOIT and SEV ICKES, initiating art:   The First Star, designed paper collage. 
​
Picture

Response by poet NANCY WALLACE-NELSON: Velvet Green Vulva
​
         The heart of Mother Earth 
         pulses midst sparkling galaxies,
         as she weaves her seamless rounds of fertility.
 
         Earth suckles golden fields, 
         nurtures mountains and hills, 
         bears fruit in sweet profusion.
 
         Mother Earth’s velvet green vulva 
         undulates gracefully,
         as she is luxuriously fertilized
         by the strong rolling waves of Father Sky.
​
​
The majestic Moon
sits regal and bright,
eternal witness to the blessed coupling.
                                                                                               
The Tree of Knowledge,
man’s break for freedom and fulfillment,
stands blackened by hubris.
Its stark frigidity
bears mortal threat
to the sacred coupling 
that once kept man safe
and warm within the opulent folds
of Mother Earth’s velvet green vulva.

This is Set 3. Click to go to Intro Page   Set 1   Set 2   Set 4   Set 5   Set 6   Afterword
Picture
Sign  up for our monthly ArtNotes newsletter.
​@2014 Artists' Cooperative of Mendocino, Inc.
​                           All rights reserved.

Artists’ Co-op of Mendocino Gallery 
​Located NW corner of Kasten and Albion Sts.

(707) 937-2217    
USmail:  Box 1943, Mendocino CA 95460
(mail is not delivered to the street address)
Go to the website:  www.artcoopmendocino.com 
To contact the Co-op email  [email protected]
​To contact the webmaster, 
enter "attn webmaster" on the subject line
  • Welcome !
  • Artists
    • Monthly Sampler
    • Photography >
      • Shanti Balsé
      • Sharon Garner
      • Pat Toth-Smith
    • Painting, Printmaking, Drawing, Multimedia >
      • Mary T. Anderson
      • Shanti Benoit
      • Karen Bowers
      • Laura Corben
      • David L. Cross
      • Joseph DuVivier
      • Stephen Garner
      • Debra Lennox
      • Karen Embree Reynolds
      • Robert Spies
      • Lynne Whiting
      • Robert Yelland (paintings)
      • Lynne Zickerman Olson
    • Jewelry, Sculpture, Ceramics, other 3D Art >
      • Jim Cowles
      • Maralee Greene (ceramics)
      • Robert Spies Sculpture
      • Robert Yelland (jewelry)
    • Guest Artists >
      • Lynne Butler (Ceramics)
      • Sev Ickes (Joyous Scenes)
      • Wendell Rickon (Upcycle Woodwork)
      • Robert Spies Sculpture
  • About Us
    • Find and Contact Us
    • Information, Calendar, Kudo
  • Exhibitions
    • Current Featured Artist
    • Online Exhibitions >
      • Selected Conundrums
      • Ekphrasis IX 2020 Exhibition
      • Ekphrasis XII 2023 Exhibition
      • Ekphrasis X 2021 Exhibition
      • Heart and Flowers
      • Ekphrasis XI 2022 Exhibition >
        • Marine Mendocino
        • Transitions
        • Collaborative Collages
      • Ekphrasis XIII 2024 Exhibition
  • ArtNotes