Welcome to December’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine, and happy December holidays for all who celebrate – Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, the Solstice, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve. Inviting everyone to savor the change of seasons, the variety of scenery and the chance to celebrate and honor family, faith, and love.
This month brought in a balance of various artistic media: essays, poetry, photography, paintings, books and music for review and discussion – all exploring our theme of Reinterpretation. This concept involves bringing some project or idea into a different setting, changing some aspects of it while leaving others as they are.
Photographer Tom Heinz visually reinterprets reflections of rocks and trees in water as totem poles or faces, metaphorically showing us the ‘face’ of Mother Nature and the power of imagination and the mind to locate orderly images in the wild. Acrylic painter Priyanka also draws upon the mind and spirit, as she takes some of her cultural iconography, scrolls and spirals, and depicts devotion to her Lord Shiva, but also presents a personal quest for identity, represented by the images of a transcendent ‘core.’ She finds herself through finding her faith, and discovers the two are inseparable.
Continuing her Happy Armageddon series, Lisa Demb sets some of her signature designs into new color schemes, evoking a new atmosphere and inspiring another look at her work. The intense shading draws viewers in and makes each sketch unique, striking, although vaguely familiar. In the same way, organists at Berkeley’s Community Theater take old instruments and musical styles and bring them forward into a new, modern setting. The older images and instruments stand out in their new arrangements, making a statement precisely because they themselves remain unchanged.
Sometimes facts and physical details stay the same, but change nonetheless when we consider them in a new light. Sarah’s essay explains how she continues to faithfully love her children, despite the mental and physical illnesses which prevent her from raising them herself. At first glance some might think she does not care for her two teens, but through her writing she attempts to convey her side of the story, to fully explain why and how things happened. As with Demb’s work, we have the same foreground event/image, but set against a different background, that of a parent struggling against illness and poverty rather than an inexplicably inattentive mother.
Sarah’s essay takes intimate and personal material and revisits it from a new point of view, and painter Andrew Ek carries out a similar process visually, re-examining the same models and subjects in different colors and at different angles. In a way reminiscent of Demb’s Armageddon and Margarita series, although more geometric and stylized, his work draws viewers to examine the subtle effects of each variation in shape and color.
His fellow painter Stephen Williams re-interprets scenes less literally and directly, exploring the combined effects of dreams and memory. Where and when exactly do our crystal-clear, specific memories mutate into vague nostalgia? Is nostalgia any more or less ‘real’ than the events it represents? Williams conveys the fuzzy boundaries surrounding what we remember through gauzy soft-edged watercolor, expressing emotion as well as place and time.
Sometimes what we remember and reinterpret comes from the broader context of our cultures, the outside world which informs our personal memories. Matthew Felix Sun finds philosophical and cultural relevance for modern feelings of alienation and the fear of losing control of our lives within Greek and Chinese mythology. Although his art positions the creatures and characters within their traditional settings and renders them in a fairly classical manner, his choice of subject matter and his descriptions of each scene highlight the struggle against confusing external forces. Even Felix Sun’s Minotaur is not a heartless monster, but a creature doomed to eternal violence against humanity and thus accepting of the peace brought through his death.
Illustrator Spencer Hallam openly acknowledges and pays homage to the concept of creating and abstracting myth through the process of developing work in close collaboration with a writer. Some of his art directly portrays personal re-interpretations of mythology – i.e. his renderings of Aesop’s Fables – but Hallam views everything he creates as an opportunity to look for and uncover the underlying philosophical concept behind the writer’s idea.
Global Exchange’s Reverse Trick-Or-Treating reportage and Patsy Ledbetter’s poetry also represent various ways to engage personally with cultural and philosophical traditions. They take the Western celebrations of Halloween and Thanksgiving and incorporate personal, spiritual, and/or international elements. Global Exchange combines consciousness of Central American and African cacao bean farmers into an American holiday involving prepackaged chocolate, bringing the international and socioeconomic into the personal, while Ledbetter does the reverse, offering a specific personal look at an abstract United States holiday.
Business consultant and writer Otto Thav takes specific examples of corporate malpractice and inefficiency he has observed and turns them into parables for effective, moral management techniques. Like Aesop or Marcus Aurelius, Thav abstracts and reinterprets our contemporary culture into a modern mythology.
Novelist Ashley Boettcher works with currently popular themes and motifs in Western culture – apocalyptic suspense and the paranormal. She takes our modern mythologies and reinterprets them to incorporate real people and families, real life and specific events. And that slice-of-life, human interest approach to Armageddon and political assassinations becomes the novel’s greatest strength – that life, in its complex, hilarious, confusing, frustrating glory becomes posited against death, fear, and monomaniacal obsession with power.
On a less somber note than Armageddon, fashion industry leader Owen Geronimo seeks to revive the business and art of apparel in San Francisco. In a discussion with Synchronized Chaos Magazine, Geronimo wonders whether the city’s unique artistic heritage and cultural histories can be distilled into a ‘San Francisco Aesthetic.’ What makes San Francisco fashion distinct from that of other places, and what and how does that reflect on our broader cultural values? In a sense we participate in enacting a societal pageant every day when we choose our clothes and our activities – we take part in a broad interpretation of cultural mythology and values every time we choose to follow fashion (or not!)
Celebrating December’s holidays represents our opportunity to engage with and reinterpret cultural mythologies to our tastes and values – and we at Synchronized Chaos wish you a beautiful season and a wonderful time reading this issue! Please feel welcome to leave comments for and to contact and network with artists and writers whom you admire.