ZOËLAB: THE LIFE AS ART BLOG

Zoë Dearborn 12/10/17 Zoë Dearborn 12/10/17

La Guardia Airport Power Point Presentation

ZOELAB DAY 114

Original Date of Post: December 23, 2012

In honor of the holiday traveling that I am not doing, that many other people are doing, I wanted to share my first power point art series I made when I lived in New York, two months after Lucas and I started dating. He had gone to Baja to see his sister for a few weeks, and was returning to New York. We were in the early stages of falling in love, and I decided it was important to pick him up at the airport after his late night flight. I didn’t have a car, so I took a cab to La Guardia Airport. I got there early, and I had some time to kill so I walked around taking photos. About a month or so earlier, I had come into possession of my first digital camera. It wasn’t even mine, it was something I got to use because of my job at a children’s services agency as Publications Coordinator, in house publications designer, and Alumni Relations Coordinator. I needed to take photos at Alumni events, so they got me a digital camera, which I pretended was mine and brought with me everywhere. Until that camera, the only other cameras I had used were 35 mm SLRs, which I had been using since I was fifteen. (As a younger child I had used two cameras given as gifts from my parents--the Nikon Disc camera (remember those? the film looked like little View Master slides) and a Polaroid.) In 2003, having a digital camera changed completely the way I took photographs. I discovered and developed a new style almost instantly.

As I waited for Lucas at La Guardia airport, I wandered around taking photos of things that caught my eye. Later, when I examined the images at work, a universal story emerged, personal only because of the context in which they were taken. I felt the photos had captured the contrast between the visual mundanity of airline travel and the internal feelings of excitement because of who you are traveling to see. For some reason, perhaps because I was at work, I decided the series needed to put together on power point, and hence my first power point art was created.

Zoë Dearborn 11/4/17 Zoë Dearborn 11/4/17

Dia De Muertos, A Magical Day of Creativity & Community in Todos Santos

A very special day filled with art & community in Todos Santos in photos.

Thursday, November 2nd, A Day in Our Life

7 AM - Wake up in panic. We need to put together a Dia de Muertos costume for Emilio’s costume contest and school

7:15 AM - Drinking coffee, because nothing happens until I drink my coffee

7:20 AM - Looking for and finding old face paint in my camper/studio that I haven’t used or cleaned in two years

7:25 AM - Looking through my collection of costumes, finding an old hat of mine, and fishing out Emilio’s hole-filled pants from the hamper

7:45 AM - Applying make up to Emilio’s Face feeling rushed, stressed and inadequate as mother

8:15 AM - Drop Emilio and his friends at school

9:30 AM - Look desperately through the mess in my house to find my painting pants, paint brushes (which I haven’t used in many years) and pallet

10:30 AM - Show up at the wall at the Cultural Center in Todos Santos, find my spot and start painting my skull

3:30 PM - Emilio comes to help me paint. I find out he won first prize at the costume contest at school

5:30 PM - Finish up my skull and go to Hotel Casa Tota to be fed and quenched. Sit with old and new friends and celebrate

7:00 PM - Head to the Town Plaza to see the beautiful ofrenda, Emilio, friends and other offerings

8:00 PM - JJ does a puppet show and dance party for los niños. All the kids get up on stage and dance with him

8:30 PM - I am unexpectedly invited to dance along with the Mojiganga giant puppet show that Emilio has been helping to paint on for weeks with Maria at Puente de Milagros

8:30 - Fretting I am wearing nothing but my dirty painting clothes, and therefore am not prepared to perform on stage, I go to get my face painted as a clown skull in two minutes by the lovely Zephyr at the Puente de Milagros booth

8:40 PM: I am suddenly on stage with Maria, Emilio, Ashta, a group of adorable children of all ages and from all places, and am helping to lead the children in an improvised dance that supports the energy of each Mojiganga— Earth, Fire, Wind & Water. JJ is playing bass, electronic beats and another woman is singing a haunting melody. I am dancing and my body is aching from painting all day, but I still release the energy needed. We are joined by a team of drummers, including Kurtis & my mother in law Ruth

9:20 PM: Done with the performance, all of us exhausted, Lucas Emilio and I head to the ice-cream parlor for a treat

Zoë Dearborn 8/21/15 Zoë Dearborn 8/21/15

self & other

The paradox of humanity is that we want to be ourselves and yet we want to connect with others. We are taught to believe we cannot have both. We come to feel that in order to be ourselves we might risk losing the other because the other is afraid of our otherness. And if we connect, then we must say goodbye to that which makes us totally unique--our point of view. Connection & Separation. And so it is a dance between the two as we evolve.

But what if we got conscious enough so that we changed society simply by being different—by being more tolerant of difference, by being more compassionate towards ourselves and others? By being whole within—our society would become whole without. It is the light of consciousness that helps us find the way, and yet, it is the hardest thing to do because it means feeling our darkness. Acknowledging and then reclaiming our shadow is so threatening to the ego because we must face that in us which we have judged as distasteful, unacceptable, shameful. Shadow work requires courage and courage means feeling our feelings--not shrinking, not puffing up--but hanging around with our fear and our uncertainty and our desire.

When we get more comfortable with our feelings we get better at connecting and when we get better at connecting, we feel more comfortable with feeling our feelings around others, which leads to deeper & more meaningful connections. And this is how society changes. One connection at a time. First to the self and then to the other.

What if we used our power and our love and our creativity to change the way are with ourselves, and with each other? What if each of us was committed to caring more? To sharing more? What if it wasn’t something to make fun of or be embarrassed about—caring? What if it were natural to treat each other as family, as if, we truly belonged to the same thing? What if we could truly feel that at the deepest level we were inseparable? And what if, at the same time, we also celebrated how different each of us is? What if we delighted in difference and saw it as a perfect manifestation of diversity? What if we could embrace both at the same time?

Ourselves and each other.

Unity and diversity. In mystery.

Can you picture this?

Zoë Dearborn 6/28/15 Zoë Dearborn 6/28/15

Life as Art Manifesto, First Try

We have faith in love & creativity as the underlying forces of evolution. We are at a crucial moment in time—a crossroads, where humanity is in grave danger. We can allow humanity to self-destruct, allowing the baser aspects of humanity: apathy, greed, violence, addiction, control to win over the elevated parts of humanity: compassion, creativity, passion, connection, joy, kindness or we can make the hard choice to take responsibility for ourselves, as individuals, and see the underlying truth of universal oneness. Within and without. We can start to awaken the truth behind our collectively accepted delusion into the idea that we are separate. From the place of separateness we compete, and create hierarchy and inflict deep suffering on our ourselves and each other.

We have inherited a split and fragmented world that is reflected in a split and fragmented psyche on the individual level. There is a fundamental flaw in the way we approach life, this is learned, and not part of the essence of humanity. The split. We tend to see things as either/or. We force ourselves to choose, over and over, between self & other, male & female, republican & democrat, east & west, power & love, mind & body. Creating, at every turn, a hierarchy of choice. Instead, we must acknowledge that a balance or overlapping of two opposites is the space where truth resides. The list of splits is infinite in itself. For every truth its oppose is also equally true. However, true love is whole because it contains everything within it. The opposite of Love is not Hate, but rather, separation. Underlying so much suffering in this world are feelings of fear, loneliness, shame, and inadequacy. This does not have to be so, but it requires great emotional risk to allow ourselves to connect, to belong to each other. This is a process that can happen only one moment at a time, one relationship at a time.

When living Life As Art, we are not prescribing any dogma or adhering to any hierarchy. The one universal truth is is the universe itself. The totality. In this way, we acknowledge the source of our longing and the object of our longing is the same. We are simultaneously subject and object of our experience. We see the two sides of everything, but we do not take sides. We compromise between the two. We balance. We soften our hearts to allow for both. We acknowledge the ego, we can even love the ego, but we do not let it rule. We see it is as the smaller or unique self that plays an important role—it becomes a mirror for the universal spirit. A celebratory expression of god. The unique individual is soul’s expression of spirit, if we can allow its whole truth to shine forth, with out judgment. Judgment, used here, refers to value. Non judgment acknowledges that all experience is subjective, and therefore, no experience is intrinsically more valuable than another. Any experience is fodder for our art, and through art, we create our life. Through our life we create our art. This is the language of the soul that must be included, woven into our culture. We do not choose rationality over emotion, but rather, we allow them to co-exist, honoring their dual greatness and necessity for living. Even hate or violence—if it exists, we acknowledge it—we do not turn away from it—as then it would surely try to make itself known in a far more dangerous way. We learn to express hatred and violence instead symbolically—through storytelling, or games, or any art form or our choosing. This is how it is done in traditional cultures—the shadow is integrated into the rituals and rites, instead of being acting out unconsciously.

Living life as art, we celebrate the all of life through ritual, storytelling, & artmaking of all kinds. We acknowledge both our darkness and our light and locate ourselves at the center. We create space and silence for our creativity. We know ourselves, and make highest use of ourselves. We reach for our destiny through integrating our past. We exalt the beauty of life as it unfolds. We acknowledge our fears and bravely transmit our hearts.

Zoë Dearborn 6/22/15 Zoë Dearborn 6/22/15

Spring Family Drawing

I suddenly felt that anything I drew that had Mio's mark on it was better, more interesting. It was also an experience in letting go of ego.

We started doing "family drawings" three years ago. The idea for them started when I was drawing on art cards that Emilio started drawing on with me. There was something about the process of collaborating with Emilio's untrained, organic marks with my somewhat tighter, design-y style that worked for me. It was a revelatory moment. I suddenly felt that anything I drew that had Mio's mark on it was better, more interesting. The contrast between our styles fascinated me. It was also an experience in letting go of ego. Every mark he made that I didn't like, I had to either accept for its own truth & beauty, or find a way to make it more interesting by connecting to it, or by highlighting it. The only rule is you are not allowed to draw on top of what someone else drew with out permission. These little cards soon led to bigger work. And then Lucas started joining us. We would put a large sheet of paper on the dining room table, and each of us sitting in our normal place for meals, we would each draw in one section, working sometimes for a few hours (some of us would take breaks and then return.) Family Drawings have now become one of our trademarks, and I have done this process with my students, other family members or guests who come over for dinner.

The drawing above was done on Easter Sunday. Its resemblance to Easter-y type themes is purely coincidental, or rather, unconsciously synchronistic. It's my favorite one to date.

Art is there for us to make beauty out of the human experience.

The thing that I have always wanted more than anything, is to be an artist. To make work that is of value to our culture—so that it can show culture what it misses about nature. I see it as my duty to share the shadow of my particular experience, instinctively knowing that it reflects the experience of others. Maybe not everyone. But at least a few thousand or maybe even millions of others. That is still a very small percentage of people who live on this planet. I can’t move forward through life with out needing to make something out of it—on some mornings I feel anger, and then underneath that, a deep wounding. A feeling of being misunderstood, small, as if I am turning into dust. And then a need to turn that feeling into something beautiful, something that suggests the mystery of its wholeness—its beauty and struggle. A poem, perhaps. A song. On some days I want to propel myself into the spotlight—letting a certain rowdy energy flow through me in the form of song, rock-n-roll abandon. A voice that carries with it the repressed rebellion of my teenage years mixed with rage for growing up female, and almost never feeling seen for all that I really am. Sometimes the scientist shows up, and wants to explain away this feeling—to understand it and put it in its proper context, to measure it. To find a solution. Sometimes I want to track something until it becomes just another aspect of nature’s design.

Sometimes, I want to sit in a deep and fulfilled silence. Opening up to the sensual information that permeates my entire body. I want to let this happen, while images-- me lying face up in the a sea that is filled with the disintegrated words and thoughts in my head. This too, is art. I am coming to see that all experience of humanity is art when we open our eyes just a little bit wider, and we let wonder back in. When we let the child’s eyes, and the woman's instincts, and the man’s power, when we let all of our experience back into our awareness, we are moving into life as art. When we make choices about our awareness—what we want to put our attention on in any given moment, we are living life as art. When we soften into, even just for a moment, the inexpressible longing that emanates from our heart. This too, is art. For when we engage in the soul, as Thomas Moore writes, we are creating ourselves. The transient & elusive material of the soul is unreachable, except by through art. Jung saw this process as alchemy, though he did not think of it as art. I do.

There is anger in me about something. It is the split between art and life. It is the split between artists and non-artists. That art is somehow reserved for the special people in life, and the rest of us, well we just drone through life, asleep. I refuse to accept this piece of culture that we have inherited. I am ready to change culture by magnifying, elevating the beauty of the everyday experience into art. Everything can be art. Who believed this? Andy Warhol. I believe he was very misunderstood. Many people forgot what a humanist he really was. His message of art was that we are all artists—and that is what he attracted to him—underdog dreamers who wanted their first chance to be elevated. The mistake he made, and they made, was that his ego got in the way, and he didn’t empower his followers. He didn’t tell them that it wasn't his duty to make them a star. It was up to each of them to find the star within themselves. This mistake cost lives, even his own. In religion, it has been the same way, but to a much higher degree of destruction. The greatest artists, just as the greatest spiritual teachers of humanity, knew the secret was in all of us. And yet, our culture cuts us off from seeing that only that special person over there is gifted, and we must worship him in order to be free. That is absolutely incorrect, and I know this with all certainty. The true message of those heroes that we adore, that we feel inclined to worship, was that god is everyone of us. The art that flows out, that is god. The love, that is god. Our essential nature is all the same. The way it looks, and the way we access it, the way we express it—there are a billion ways, a trillion ways. But we are all artists, or can be if we choose, all we have to do is realize that this is so.