Portrait of the Artist as an Immigrant

Present Sound, Silent Space by Rusty Kjarvik

"The acorn can become an oak, and not a donkey!" (C.G. Jung)

"...that time when he let himself go and when he landed deep down in what he came to call the collective unconscious, all this rejected feminine in himself, confronted him."

- from Part 6 of "Matter of Heart" documentary on Carl Jung

As you may have noticed, I have copyrighted my digital art images. This week, "Mountain Reflection on Cyclical Wordplay" and "Present Sound, Silent Space" now published on my blog under Experimental Writing Gallery, have been selected for what is my first live art exhibition, alongside professional artists. The exhibition supports emerging immigrant artists like myself.

"Mountain Reflection on Cyclical Wordplay" at Endeavor Gallery

Read Here: Cultural Intersection 2012 & Gallery Poster

I have been contemplating selling my art prints here online, they are currently being printed as a limited edition (1 of 100) series on a photo canvas at 20" x 30" dimensions. If there is any interest, or any comments regarding this idea, please feel free to email me at rkjarvik25@gmail.com

Thanks for reading SoJourn(al): Private Dreams to Public Art !

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A co-musician friend meanders and strays with eager intention, playful, directly before me. I am defenseless. As he approaches, leaping over me, my body transforms into mountain stone. Hard-edged scree and hillocks crack and harden in a gross maze of cavernous earth rock. Self-created, I transform. I am the mountain. My hair blows mercilessly, mutating into the icy summit winds. I rumble and shake with tectonic might. Mountain goats find refuge in my side, opening into an open cave. My friend enters.  

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Goats

"When interpreting dreams with goats in them, consider the characteristics that we associate with these animals. We consider them to be sturdy and tenacious...Additionally, in pagan mythology goats are considered to be symbols of sexual vitality." (iDream)

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recite,
passage in the name,
that subconscious wandering
that pierces through life, a remembrance
that deceived unity into a grandiose measure
foraging beneath the earth for emergent corpses, dusty in pain

- excerpt from "Inspired by 'the Reading'"

Liberation in the Unconscious Embodiment of the Archetype

“The last dream of that series, I can not tell you all the dreams, was that I was out in nature, I stood in a field of wheat. An enormous field of wheat, that was ripe for harvest. I was a child and I held her in my arm like a baby. The wind was blowing over that field of wheat, now you know when the wind is blowing over a wheat field those waves over the wheat field, and with these waves I swayed like that, putting her as if were to sleep. She felt as being in the arms of a god, of the Godhead. I thought, now, the harvest is ripe. I must tell her. I told her, you see, what you want and what you project into me because you are not conscious of it, you have the idea of a deity you don’t possess, therefore you see it in me. That clicked…It was a hedonist god, it was a god of nature, of vegetation, he was the wheat himself, the spirit of the wheat, the spirit of the wind. She was in the arms of that numen. That is the living experience of an archetype…instantly it clicked…it is as the dream says, she is in the arms of that archetypal idea. Now that is a numinous experience and that is the thing that people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value. They depend on other conditions, their desires, their ambitions, they depend on other people because they have no value in themselves, they are only rational, they are not in possession of a treasure that would make them independent…that is a sort of liberation.”   

- C.G. Jung, from "Matter of Heart" 

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"What primitive African stirring is this? What crowd of blundering hippos gawking and feeling for life in this mildew maw parade!" 

"No, this is a wisdom gathering, a hapless ruse, to stun the oceans in a violent gaze of electric natural law. This is a spectral breeding ground for the insane and loose, those wilderness souls born of less indication about human truth than one would suspect from a life lived in the rut. Theirs is a tribal howl, a martyr’s plea, scintillating rasps into the smoked down calling of witchcraft and group camaraderie through spirit, through visceral tongues." 

I am drowned in a haze of strident intensity, pulsating with every leap from the vibrating mud. The trickster’s love emanates with personified blood from the livid sky teething for human thought and supernal desire in this mundane autochthona of self-engendered lust, detoxified in a laughing rite with the living dream of mystery, hatching from this circle of African might. Their clothes, wooly, with animal fear still stretched in the discolored hair. Their homes, perfect and ingenious with seamless appropriation from this their exploited grounds, invoked to newborn life again in their visible joy, communal through and through.

I escape along the brush torn paths, bitten with stings of lightning and the swatting touch of snakeskin and the feline tail, scattering an infinitesimal infinitude of insects grouping. The countryside folds past over the close horizon, a dense lush grows as by sight. A beast moves, unknown. Feathers, white and tall scatter in the noiseless round. I can sense auspicial animation as the forest glows and rumbles ever slightly. The bird is infamous for its glaring foresight, its strength and unearthly demeanor is its hallmark to fruition in surviving this drunken dreaming landscape of danger without forewarning. I follow the animal beyond the gates of our natural boundary, or has it followed me? Can we both be following? There is no end. 

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Africa

"To dream that you are in Africa surrounded by Cannibals, foretells that you will be oppressed by enemies and quarrelsome persons." (iDream)

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Branded with the seal of history.
Final and rushed.

“Oh, this is dramaturgy for the sentimental boorish audience of the mob,
who critique and pander with total, serious divorce from the actuality of the place
an energy, which creates law from reason and implements cost
with soul in the spiritual night of the living ghosts.

Do we haunt you?”

“You are my foreboding reminder
behind the veil that shivers with end of day
returning only for the antipodal colour
resembling rust,
yet focused in bottom-up vines that reach to an endogenous planet.

It is leaving earth. We are going with it.”

- excerpt from "Brimming with Dissatisfaction"