Cracked Window

My artist friend Benjamin Alexander Clark churned out twenty paintings of Barack Obama in three days this week. An amazing feat by any standard, though I’m not surprised given Benjamin’s talents and energy. As of this afternoon, four had sold — the fourth to me.

The Obama paintings are prominently displayed at Cannibals on NW 21st Avenue in Portland, where owner Pamela Springfield features works by ninety-six local artists.

Insane, abandoned, and anonymous. This describes many people who lived out there lives at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, starting in 1883 and into the 1970s. Their cremated remains were put in numbered copper canisters and stored.

But time and chemical reactions have turned them into art after death, art challenging perceptions of what it means to die. Acclaimed photographer David Maisel has documented the stark individuality blossoming from each person’s remains.

In an essay, Maisel, who gave me permission to publish one of his pictures, writes:

The canisters ask us to consider ‘What happens to our bodies when we die; what happens to our souls?’ Matter lives on even when the body vanishes, even when it has been destroyed by an institutionalized methodology of incinerating the body to ash and categorizing it by a number stamped into the lid of the ashes’ metal housing. Does some form of spirit live on as well?

I’ll consider those questions when I see Maisel’s “Library of Dust,” his Portland Art Museum exhibit that opens September 1. My context will be the remnant of my mother’s ashes that haven’t been scattered. I’ve divided this smattering into three tiny piles, stored less evocatively than those of the insane, one each for my two brothers and me.

In life, my mother might have found Maisel’s questions too weighty. But she would have laughed at the idea of resting, at least temporarily, in my three-year-old son’s discarded plastic Play-Doh containers.

I need to find something copper that would better suit her aesthetic tastes until the time inevitably comes for her to mix with me.

I’m hardly an art critic. And I don’t abide by the cliché, “I know good art when I see it.” Like many people, I gravitate to images that trigger an emotional and visceral reaction that lingers. That’s the experience I had last night, stumbling upon Steampunk wallpapers while cruising boingboing.

This morning at breakfast, my little boy Atticus freaked out when a big fly buzzed on a window near him. It seemed like an overreaction for someone who dug worms and fed them to the goldfish in our little pond before he could walk. (Easy for me to judge.) Maybe this stunning photo will make him less afraid. Or more:

I wish I could say I captured the image among our Portland rose bushes. Instead I’ll say “keep up the great work” to Robin Gage in Atlanta, a photographer friend of my daughter Erin. Robin proves once again that the world we typically perceive isn’t what it seems. Check out more of Robin’s rose gallery on her blog.