Galleries and Exhibits - Treuren
Petronella Ytsma
January 9 - January 15, 2004
The Gage Family Art Gallery
Exhibit Notes
That place in the soul, yours and mine, where sorrow alights and takes up residence, denying any shelter of distance from the relief of not knowing. There is no comfort in the grasp of grief. It is in its presence that our humanity, yours and mine, takes form, where we find peace in vulnerability and the source of our tears. This is the place that dismisses nothing, forces looking, and bars escape. Get into it, not over it. Stand in it, don’t walk away. Invest energy in emotional balance, build strength, not debt. These are the natural resources of our humanity. These are the raw materials of our lives - not to be abused, not to be dismissed in ignorance, but held tightly in our HANDS.
Human hands are the original and ultimate tool. Our hands, yours and mine, are our projection into the world and our mechanisms that bring the world to us. The world is “handy,” ever at hand, within our grasp, ours to know. Hands are gestural, they are iconic, they are demonstrative of the discourse of the soul. Please wipe my tear. I mourn in their uplifted posture before my face. I wring my hands in seeing the world out-of-hand, passed to the hands of small and self-serving minds, distant from the values and stewardship that we and the world require and deserve. These hands are consumed in the tasks of living, marked by the flames of a world ablaze in change and grasping.
Who has removed the world from our grasp? Who holds the world distant from our touch? Who owns this chaos? What can I do in the face of a world that is no longer “handy” or at hand? Who will hear me weep? Who will see the tear that flows from my knowing, and is the resource of my soul, the water of my world?
The world tells me of our - its and your and my - vulnerability, fragility, and ultimate dispensability in the face of events we cannot grasp or take hold of. These hands are my gesture of ownership of grief, emptiness and powerlessness, my witness of hegemonic and global energies that grasp and mutilate the environment and squander both resource and human safeguard for transitory and self-serving ends.
In my tear, I see the waters of the world that are being diverted, not unlike the petro resources that are being marshaled for Western use and the ravaging of the earth for corporate gain. Local populations are denied access to their own water in order to provide a designer liquid to an unquenchable world. Those who ignore the evidence that this world is out-of-hand contribute to disease, malnutrition, and disempowerment that take their toll on the quality of all our lives.
And who are we to say "This is out of my hands?"
