By Roz Dimon
“Excuse me, where is the cafeteria?”
“You’re standing in front of it.”
“Oh.”
No wonder I couldn’t see it.
I still can’t see it. Not clearly. I’m pondering the CIVA conference, “Matter and Spirit: Art and Belief in a Digital Age.” It’s a month later and I cannot completely fathom it [only Photoshop knows the truth].
Being lost. It can be fun [But Biola University? Where the heck is that?] — A JetBlue adventure that took me from NYC to California skipping over the Kansas plains — that somehow got mixed back into it all every morning over scrambled eggs [throw in the Tate Modern, Indian saris, ordinary salt and pepper shakers, a few wizard-like monks who looked like they should be playing basketball, LOTS of backpacks -- some brand new, some worn].
I went into orbit witnessing Lia Chavez’s animated photography bring darkness into a fully ‘human-lit’ standstill, felt perplexed, hood-winked a bit but intrigued by the performance artist, Steven Ounanian, laughed ‘til I cried listening to poet, Aaron Belz, had my digital headgear shaken by a tete-a-tete on the scholars track with William Catling and was aghast at the warmth I felt creeping up my neck as Craig Goodworth (think ‘Hemingway meets monk meets Paul Bunyon’) played a video where in a solitary wilderness trek, he places fire-warmed rocks into a newly slit carcass. (New York City was beginning to look like a warm fuzzy field of piping plovers.)
Jesus? Hmm. Heard very little about him specifically but he seemed to be omnipresent, binding.
One can only be lost when in search of something.
Roz Dimon aka “rozolution” is Director of Communication Arts at St. Bart’s in New York City. She has painted stories with a digital brush since 1984, the latest of which are Dimonscapes. Her work combines American 21st century pop iconography and capitalist themes with spiritual investigation. Dimon was on the scholars’ track at this year’s CIVA Conference 2011: Matter and Spirit: Art in a Digital Age.