Between You, Me, and the Joshua Tree

The idea behind this show is almost straight-forward, close to simple. The images selected for these collages are drawn from our local landscape here in the Mojave (and from ideas inspired by that landscape). So the art is a celebration of the natural world around us.

Mojave Inspired Collages

by Eric Martin

Showing at Sagebrush Cafe in Quartz Hill starting February, 2017

But it’s also a recognition of the sublime that exists within that natural world, the silent substrata of the Numinous that infuses all things. It’s a way of taking a long pause to look again at the sights we learn to take for granted (and so stop seeing) and to find something sacred waiting there in the space of that intentional breath.

 

June Milham says that we may be losing sight of the sacred in today’s world. We may be too immersed in the details of our material lives, in our posts and tweets and updates, to take that necessary, intentional breath and let ourselves be surprised again at what silently waits for us in the desert, the ripeness of the natural world, each moment’s gravidity, pulsing with something that we recognize but cannot name.

And this is, technically, an image of the sublime – that which exists beyond the reach of our apprehension. It’s something built into our surroundings, just around the corner of what we can put into words.

These collages are little meditations on that idea, trying to be that breath, for a moment, where we see again the things that we have learned not to see. Making a brief celebration of our desert landscape.

There are maps used here that sometimes play the part of the sky, a two-dimensional ground tilted up to imply something equally expansive but far more porous.

There is some idea here also that this palimpsest of texts – images, book pages, maps – might mimic the way we are forced to look at the world through all the words in our heads. There is something that comes between us and the Joshua tree we may happen to be staring at.

And we want to step past that mediating field of words and abstractions to approach the sublime, which is, in its way, both the ultimate abstraction and the ultimate reality. We want to take that Joshua tree and remove it from its background and see it for what it is.

Between You, Me, and the Joshua Tree

Mojave Inspired Collages

by Eric Martin

Showing at Sagebrush Cafe 

42014 50th Street West

Quartz Hill, Ca 93536

http://www.sagebrush-cafe.com

 

About the Artist: Eric Martin is one of the owners of Sagebrush Café. He started participating in gallery shows with his collage art in 2010. Martin is also a writer and English instructor and the editor of this site. You can see some of his essays at Pop Matters, the Write Launch and Steinbeck Now.