.png)
Migiwa Orimo’s “Margins” exhibition, featuring “The Day Before Tomorrow”
Margination. Imargination, the margins of our imagination. Margin Nation. A nation of margins. A nation on the margin (of solidity? of sanity? of morality? of sustainability? of legitimacy? of...?)
What good are the little acts of art in the face of our seemingly behemoth crises confronting us today? We are indeed living on a new kind of margin, and do seem to find ourselves hovering tenuously at the edge of the world that we have known. All the while being pushed into fatal addictions by the false prophet dealers of nationalism and tribalism, a con artist culture of consumerism uber alles.
It's in the face of our time of crisis that the inspiration of an artist like Migiwa Orimo really feels like needed spiritual tonic for our current moment. Migiwa is a deservedly renowned artist, whose recent works on living in the margins, life on the day before tomorrow, the loud subtext of truths being buried in the silence - all of it quite relevant. As she notes, Margins is the use of art “to reimagine and reshape the areas that are often excluded, suppressed, or overlooked by dominant narratives or structures, to represent these spaces as sites of complexity, diversity, resistance, and resilience.”
Something that resonates very much with It’s All Happening.
Frankly it is art that’s going to be in the lead in saving us, if we are to be saved. It’s how we even define the struggle itself, the ones we’re all experiencing right now, within and without. Art not only provides us an avenue for thinking more about what we feel, but even more importantly, art allows us to feel what we’re thinking, which is absolutely essential to healing and health.
Hear Migiwa talk more on this in the Margination edition of It's All Happening, which her and her work were prominent inspirations for.
Each of the 154 pages on display show the footprint, location, and dimensions of an actual ICE detention building. What goes on inside remains “redacted.”
These are made with sumi ink on pages of ‘A Dictionary of the Underworld.’
“I find so many gaps, absences in this written text. To cite them at least is to let the readers know something has been missed, or remains there hinted at by words - there in the deep structure.”
— bell hooks
Comments