The Mayan calendar is due to end October 28, 2011 (or at the winter solstice 2012 depending on interpretation) and is considered to signify an ‘end of time’ as we know it. What an ‘end of time’ means exactly is uncertain but there is some agreement that a significant transitional shift of consciousness is coming and is already underway. How does one prepare for this transition? Only by cultivating one’s own patterns of abstract interconnectedness.
In my paintings, cross cultural appropriation can allude to Native beadwork, old floor tiling, post New York school abstraction or minimalism, a board game without pieces (since the work moves without them), a Navaho blanket, or Aztec or Mayan sacred geometry. These aspects represent appropriated traditions that don’t usually coexist and a collision of cultures that are also somehow resonant with each other. Yet my work remains within the tradition of Western abstract painting, constrained by a square piece of plywood interacting with a stained grainy surface which reveals a sentient conscious unknown, superimposed by a contemporary abstract figure.
The feel of the cave — the cave.
From a cave they looked out on the world,
And struggled to understand,
And slowly the flicker of their intelligence
Grew and consumed the dusk with their mind
~ Mark Rothko, 1920s
James K-M: Paintings and Sculpture 