A Collection of May
“It makes you wonder what else might be possible - what other morsels of meaning could’ve been teased out of the static, if only someone had come along and given it a name”
Normally I have something pithy to bookend any of the images I place here. Normally. But today, I find that I am sitting here, wondering what to say about this collection of May. I just finished writing the last paper for the last class of my first year in Big Girl School and I find I am full of the things I have written in the past year.
It has been an exercise in thinking. But what has crystalized is the fact that I have fallen in love with the writing. Arranging words. Intentionally placing a word next to another to begin an idea below, or maybe to the side. To call out another word, only to use it to define something yet unknowable. Juxtaposing words that are normally found unfamiliar to one another - building a dissonance in order to navigate a tensionality in an idea.
Hearing the words side by side - do they speak they way they should, does it say something explicitly, nestled within the implicit?
Questioning not what I want to say - but how I want to say it.
I loved all the moments (mostly) captured between word, line and thought - and I wonder. I wonder if the photos I have taken this past month echo my wonderings on the page. I have collected some of my favorite word moments from this past year - so that they may sit together, maybe become something, maybe not, maybe just sit. Set atop my photos of May - maybe they will speak together, or maybe they will argue - but at the moment, they are some of my favorite things.
…(T)here is very little in this world more powerful than a story – unless it is a story that is caught, bound and bent…
On the hidden curriculum of the Calgary Stampede
…(H)idden under the simplicity of the commonplace lies a world of tensional ties between the revealed and obscured and the viewer and creator. Interwoven between is the thread of context that constantly shifts as the audience moves through time – in which that same audience will affirm or dismiss whatever meaning they choose to impose upon the image – constructing a space of discontinuity. Meaning is shaped within this realm of dissonance. Once you engage in the process of image-making, the value or meaning of the photo remains undefined until these tensions are enacted by the viewer…
On assessment of a photography student
…(B)ut it is the tension between the absence and/or presence of those same objects, where meaning is born. In the end, when you curate a collection of images, you do so with the inherent understanding that you will miscommunicate because what is shown, evokes what is not present – and in imagining what is not present, you define a space of discontinuity.
On the viewing of a photo essay
…(P)ower, you are free to go. But know this – minds are beginning to question the dualistic notion that an idea cannot exist without a counterbalance, that to exclude equals to include. What happens if a thought can exist in a mind with all other minds and thoughts? Once a thought has begun, the limits of unthinkable things crack.
Interrogating Power, an Essay.
…(W)hat changes when we view public as Power’s stage – where openings of accepted thought are defined by the limits of the unthinkable…the dismissed or the unworthy? I used to think of freedom as the ability to use my mind to make a choice – to freely pick which path to walk. But what shifts when we view choice as preordained before us - existing in open view? Already chosen – yet you are free to choose. Maxine Greene wrote “people consider themselves free if the road is open before them” – so then, I ask, is freedom free?
Or is freedom Power’s privilege?
Freedom – do you exist?
On Public
…(W)hat do discarded words unearth about teaching? Is the sheer amount of forsaken words Teachings’ way of reinventing itself? Or is it Languages’ way of sanding down roughened edges to reveal a things essence. What if – these castaways whisper of the once and the was, a warning that modern understandings are simply the echo of a words’ soul. What has language wrought upon teaching? I wonder at how vast the distance becomes between abandoned and used.
On New Words to Refine Ideas
…(T)here is power in We. There is power in Think. We think – these small, seemingly inconsequential words create a tensionality in power – who has, who can assert, who can assume. They come with a layered and storied history, one that We and They cannot fully see– a collected, composed general thought – could this be, society slyly, subversively, supporting conformity?
Thoughts from Malaise of Modernity
…I wonder, while moving within this realization do these silent shocks reverberate through these concealed knowings - like soft ripples in a pond – bringing feeling to the numbness, energizing the limits of thought, “where thought stops, what it cannot bear to know, what it must shut out to think as it does.” And perhaps what a thought can imagine? No longer shifting silently away – but building an inkling to the stays of societies canon. Animating a new consciousness.
On Power
…(T)herein lies the paradox. For could it not be said that paradoxes are truths? Simply disguised. Superficially commonsensical, but through the splitting open of constraints, paradoxes metamorphosize from a space of dissonance to a clearing of believability. What would happen if Truth and Imagination exited stage left and met in the off-limits, the space Maxine calls the ‘in-between’?
On Paradox and Imagination
…(I)magination is unfinished, as are we, unfinished.
On Paradox, Imagination and Power
