Day 20: Wildly inappropriate appropriated wildness

Wilderness mind is dissolving duality
in work of fourteen artists
whose work together
ranges from photography
to nonrepresentational painting,
performance, and installation.

References to water,
suburban irrigation systems,
the arctic ice cap,
Barr owls, sea otters,
golden trout from the Sierras,
locations from San Pedro Harbor to Mozambique.

Within the frame of wilderness,
themes of degradation and emergence,
natural cycles and mystery,
concern for the environment,
connected oneness and hope,
artistic diversity and interrelatedness.

Visitors experience a
collaborative alternative
to more traditional strategies
of agency through domination
and the possibility for everyone
to experience wilderness.

Uninhabited nature or
visual messages communicated
in workshops and programs
offered to the community
to inspire visitors to participate
in effective stewardship.

Wilderness may call to mind
places of intense experience
far from civilization and
reveal itself to be more than a location
of uncultivated, abandoned, inhospitable conditions
inhabited only by wild animals.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century meaning
expanded Romantic transcendental
reflections of longing and desire,
the best antidote to our human selves
mysteriously remain the site
of something profoundly Other.

Places are wastelands or sacred spaces,
not the places of experience
as frightening or divine opposition
apart from the human world
pure, preserved, and protected
from industrial defilements of daily life.

We disagree. We consider
high-minded dualism a dynamic conflict
a local or global, physical or imaginary
state of mind that defies location
in which social structure relaxes,
logic slips away, time and space collapse.

This open state of wonder
inspires fear, disorientation,
foreboding, and sublime landscape
in degraded urban grittiness
in an unexplored corner
of an unremarkable backyard.

Artists from Antarctica,
icebergs, and carcasses of dead birds
seek a complete relationship of
responsibility and respect
both planetary or microscopic
that we unavoidably impact.