Found Art Friday 258

Dear ones,
How are your days of May?  Ours causes muchos sneezes.  Forgive us for getting elaborate and off kilter once again.

as we spill of ourselves

 Artists are absorptive of the (now), and then they must squeeze it out through themselves the way others use a mop or sponge.

irrational exuberance

As our nation continues to fall down the stairs and bump its head on each step as it bumbles, we loop back to an eight year old project about the Financial Crash: the images align quite swimmingly.

Humpty Dumpty

All the kings horses arses

the heist

the foreclosed or otherwise stepped on, used or very nervous puppets and pawns

not together again
As the spin aggravates the weary and activates the teary

Insanely in the throes of trolling, while heads are rolling, perhaps soon choking on its own steak

As blogging has become part of our craft, like needle and thread to our sculpture of words, we think about art and technology nearly every day. This essay is the best lately from Nick Carr : You are a data mine: we all are:

Chairman of the Fed

" Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit. This is a fundamentally political and collective issue."

 Pray tell of your findings, to homelandinspiration@gmail.org

Monday Meditation hijacks Found Art Friday 257

Dear ones,
Here we are at our standing desk, which makes writing for The Department of Homeland Inspiration much more like driving a bus window through to our thoughts. This Friday, when the nation again left us speechless with its bleakness, we gagged on repeat chaos for a suitable response or non-response to yet more gun violence, already mowed over by more plumes of drama.

close up of close up of bullet discharge

Our country, addicted to war:  how can we steer it toward healing?  Again, we turn our eyes to the plant world for solace.  Today, we highlight a light papery flower with heavy overtones:  The Poppy Manifesto : ode to casual flower.

California Poppies are your best friend - up for almost anything, hearty, each day.

poppy palette pairings: beautiful against air or any other flower

Poppies, they just show up places and stay a while, and with good humor

Art Ranger simply collected a day (or two) of poppy sitings.  Many many varieties and shade variants professing divinity upon the month of May.

Open Ground Studios - see how it has opened and created its own ground?

  The thrifty and free-spirited flower also retiring itself at dusk by folding petals in repose.

Oh, hello pure yellow ....

Smaller wild variety that we don't know the species name of.  A home for black bugs that are not ants.

And marvelous markings

host of shy pale yellow spider  - select fuzziness

Have a great week full of a few exquisite moments.  Sincerely, do share at:  homelandinspiration@gmail.com.

Found Art Friday 256

Dear ones,
As the Department of Homeland Inspiration has kept watch, we continue to have no shortage of moments that bring us to our knees in this extraordinary world, don't you?

After the eloquent, yet heavy assault of listening to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" this spring, Art Ranger must take a very temporary bath in sweet smelling bee balm as antidote.  Feels as though we all need a quiver full of antidotes, in fact.  OKay ---  Snap out of it!!!!   B r e a t h e ......

Sugar snap peas: our admiration of its tendrils can not be over estimated

On the heels of these readings, we are very proud of our cousin, Erle C. Ellis who has published a new book:

Useful book for cultural workers:

(The Very Short Introduction part is nearly our favorite) ... now we might actually devour it, then add  to our car(fossilfuelcabin) door pocket-sized reading cache for in between moments.  So far:
"How could a product of nature - a Naked Ape - gain the capacity to end nature itself?  And if nature has indeed ended, what have we now?" he asks us.

"The Sea Around Us"

At age about eleven or twelve, when every other boy we knew seemed like a little idiot, Cousin Erle was decidedly not.  In fact, over the years we learned about molecular biology, Bob Marley, American blues, green manure, etc.,  ... why talk about nothing? when you can teach your older girl cousins a great many things.  So glad this guy has a lovely family, as well as many students, to pass on his constructive and instructive curiosities:

sea slug, and /or sea hare

One family vacation on a far away island paradise, we came upon some magical creatures in the tide pools that we had no name for at the time.   Over a period of days we hand built tide pool (holding tanks)network. For consecutive days, we observed and interacted with the creatures in their body temperature sculpted environment.  Like gracefully moving interior gut parts, swimming in some saline soup with gentle spots, while its muscular edged grabbed the surround. We very easily could have been dreaming, but that we were part of nature seemed tangible to us.  In our mind, the creatures seemed okay with all this; they lolled around in their pools and accepted our friendship because we were children.  It was science meets dollhouse meets art sand castle meets mystical universe of the sea, to which we could attach our own narrative.  Of course, from the gossamer folds of memory, the tide must have liberated them ........

Speaking of narratives, Garden art-if act

Please send us images that you have stubbed your toe on here: homelandinspiration@gmail.com

Found Art Friday 255

Dear ones,
We are always glad to be occasionally, in earnest , "out on the range" amongst the sage brush, crossing the Little Colorado.  Art Ranger soaks in the film made from staring out the moving window.  Not so much all those aggro trucks trucks trucks, but even relishing the refracted shine of their quilted sides.

 A road that snakes across the vast open spaces with stops.

We must say it out loud : MOTHER ROA DRT

During the long hours of traverse across the thread of pavement called highway 40, we took a break from the feed of news sickness, and instead listened to "Silent Spring" as we cut though through Navajo country. The book pairs so stupefyingly with Pruitt and The Puppet's poisonous profiteering in violation of earth and its past/present/future inhabitants. We vowed to never eat another non-organic carrot as long as we live in order to fortify ourselves and others, as we press on with our version of art activism. Though we're in what's being called the "post-truth" era, hasn't America been side-stepping truths since our inception?

Finally, the road led us to Mesa Verde, where on an unremarkable Wednesday, we used our legs to wander through centuries of human history to see the cliff dwellings (550 A.D. - 1300's).  Having delved just 20 miles off the main road, we realized that for the first time in waaay too long, that we were experiencing true q u i e t.  Quietude.  Yes, only the absence of sound, vacuumed sound.  No human made sounds whatsovever, no airplanes, no leafblowers, no washing-machines, not even birds for a spell.  Just a planet, bending and shaping and sifting itself, while we are barely here as a small grouping of cellular substances, lucky enough to spend some moments upon it. 

Plus the why? the mysterious abandonment, yet the clear ecosystem equilibriums

Often, you felt it wasn't just you being you, but others visiting your visit wearing quiet yucca fiber sandals

Soon to be interrupted by a group of grown men in trucker hats with lollipops and large p-nut shaped footprints that we ignored by imagining our fingers in our ears.  Then some severely stoned French tourists who thought that the teeny tiny houses down below were absolutely hilarious, even though Europeans were in "The Dark Ages" perhaps dying of Bubonic Plague around the time this sophisticated and spiritually connected (LEED platinum) architecture was born.

Segment of petroglyph : Note the "Whipping Kachinas"

We're drawn to the two birds far left.  This is exactly how our hens at home spend the afternoon talking quietly.

 Now we are back in the swing.  How about you? Any remnants? or ruminations?

Is it Springtime upon your planet part?  Send Found Art to:  homelandinspiration@gmail.com