Excursion - 10/1/2004

Dim gray like ash fallen from nowhere echoes back and forth in wide strokes over flesh-and-bone stalks seemingly planted into the black ground. It's very dark, and they stare up at something that I can't see.

"What do you think they're looking at?" I ask aloud. Someone is looking over my shoulder and tells me they watch anything that's up there. I'm fairly sure it's alien lifeform. That's why the background was chosen and why it's so dark. Confusion. Warped nothing poured down canvas from the reality of outside-the-box.

I turned around. The entire place was filled with people, mostly dressed in black, apparently unaware that color was the season's newest high-fashion exterior remark and perfectly suitable for a gallery opening. They were all staring, slightly upwards, near identical to the people in the painting I'd been watching. I wondered if this was the keystone to the show, the intended response from myself in the wake of the viewing.

Motionless. Most everyone stood, blank-faced, altering the images in front of them with collective experience and bending critical notions against the breakers of their knowledge. It was strange. Stranger than any of the surreal offerings or the blinding, over-exposed photography that Steve Mason had to offer us. Perhaps that was the point.

I walked through the people that couldn't move, the statues of beings locked into the process of exposing the world's background through sense-filters. I didn't believe any of them could do it.

Then I left the gallery.