in need of a visual respite

They hung up Mel Vera Cruz's artwork for the Last ever Mango Mic at Pusod this Saturday.

I got to class early, spent a few minutes looking at the artwork, then decided to take a walk. I like alot of the stuff that Mel does, but after a day of staring at computers, I just couldn't sit and look at a dozen of his pieces in close quarters for an hour, so I took a walk down 4th street, which really wasn't any better with Christmas lights and very brightly lit makeup shops and cooking appliance store packed to the gills with every combination of kitchen gadget you can imagine, and crate&barrel blandness of style and restoration hardware's monochromatic displays of repeating bathrooms but of different monochromatic colors: the white bathroom, the lavender bathroom, the mauve bathroom, the blue bathroom.

More, more, more, an overabundance of sameness to create a "special occasion" that is just as "special" as everyone else.

After 30 minutes, I walked back to the artwork which was still overloading my senses, this time finding his small details in the collages of images: britney spears' picture in the "inocente, ignorante" Mickey Mouse surrounded by malformed, distorted babies, Mel's own face in several pieces: one a picture of him, and another which looks like he made a face print of his own face four times in yellow paint. Through the initial layer of rage and anger in many of the pieces, I began to find the artist in small and almost tender ways. That there's more to the pieces than simply the shock value of the images and the topics addressed: an image of the other in ourselves, as ugly or as shocking as that may be.

The next 120 minutes were spent teaching kali, the artwork blurring to the background, my own eyesight blurring to the whirling patterns. I'm looking forward to the 480 minutes of sleep. Maybe stare at a nice blank wall for a while.