Art and Poetry of Non Linear Consciousness

April 27th was the opening at San Francisco's Inner Sunset, the Canvas Gallery for a show called Combined Weight, made primarily up of artists working for Pixar. I personally felt the most interesting work at the show was by Liz Amini Holmes., who has shown at the Canvas previously as well. She is a successful illustrator working for many types of media, and industries, with her art on display at prominant places such as MTV offices in New York. She is a San Francisco native who has done well for herself.

She has been doing illustrations for some poetry at www.madhattersreview.com, where I am the art director, and find the artists to illustrate the pieces, and work with them on that process. Liz went so far as to illustrate each stanza. That is true artistic passion. Some of the works created for our next issue, due online May 15th, were included in her large display of art at the Canvas. The show at the Canvas Gallery continues through May 22nd. I recommend you look at her pieces, while wandering around with a glass of something lovely in your hand, perusing the work of other artists as well.

Her art at the show holds together very cohesively, and makes a poetic statement about consciousness. Most pieces are centered on a face, usually disconnected from a body. Each face is transformed by its relationship to its surroundings. The faces represent consciousness in a non linear relationship with emotion, concept, personality, situation, dreams. Consciousness in her art is about free association, symbols, fragments and collages of different feelings and memories, not simple, tangible straight forward local, chronological, simple, direct relationships. Her images are painted in a flat manner out of acrylic on wood, and sometimes made into giclees which are very inexpensively priced in their fine frames. These would make excellent purchases, singly or in groups.

There are a few images that are not faces, but the context makes them seem almost as if they are faces. She has a few images of trees, and they seem to represent the consciousness of the trees as personalities. The trees seem just like plant versions of humans, side by side with her other portraits.

Her art fits perfectly with poet's Michael Mark's work that she is illustrating. His poetry is painterly, which his background as an art gallery owner would suggest. His poems to be in Mad Hatters Review are from Pieces of the Evolution Revolution.

"Diving out of the dusty painting

once hanging over my parents' couch

of a callow pacific village where

no one in the family ever went,

I floated in and out of snuff and grime..."

Liz's floating selves, interacting with their environments by being entwined in them, faces with buildings built in them, mixed with birds, and so forth, lend themselves to Michael Marks' nonlinearity that at times seems almost like randomly generated text. I chose Liz to illustrate his works because of her similar non chronological presentation of images that have symbolic space in between them. Michael's poetry does not have to be in sentence format. It does what it wants. It doesn't have to have rational punctuation. It jams words together, words that are tangible, gutsy, gritty, creating ever-changing surreal imagescapes that evoke a visceral reaction.

"warts scabs blisters rutted nails

silent cyclops encircled by wind knives

broken cuticle pumping fungus

engulfing all barriers on a saintless passage

biting off rough edges as discovered..."

This is a beautiful combination of images, and words, which will appear in the magazine with Michael reciting them for the full multisensual experience. By all means, check out the next issue, May 15th, when this stunning plunge into non linear consciousness is presented to you. And realize you are not alone in how you think, feel, and perceive.