Image: “We’re all in this together”-manipulated photography, 8.5 x 11 unframed $150
Join me March 6 for the opening reception from 5-8 at Commonwheel Gallery 102 Cañon Avenue, Manitou Springs, CO 80829 where I am featured– my new chapbook, Elementals: Poems for Gaia– in the new exhibit all month long, “Responding to Climate Change Through Art ” The organizers have written:
“Sometimes, you need more than just the facts and data to really bring home the reality of the climate crisis. And what better way to do it than through the power of ART?
Manitou Springs Art Council (MSAC) is inviting artists to create artwork that will ignite a passion to help prevent further environmental damage. This show offers a chance to use Art to create an emotional story that can inspire people to promote environmental awareness.
Many people have recommended immediate and far-reaching social, economic and technological responses and yet this isn’t happening very quickly.
Artists are invited to explore the ubiquitous and unnerving imagery of climate change and have the freedom to delve into causes, importance, hoax or not, impact on civilization, other culprits, various types of pollution, or how the humankind has historically created changes to make the environment less important than money or pleasures.
It’s all connected. How we live our lives is closely related to the state of our earth. Nature strives for balance.
This exhibition is being sponsored by the Manitou Springs Art Council (MSAC) and will be used as a fundraiser to continue support of the ARTS in Manitou Springs.“
My chapbook includes photography and poems responding to the peril of the planet. All photos are available for purchase. The chapbook sales will benefit the Manitou Arts Council and the Sierra Club. See one sample, poem, below.
Seabirds
I’m worried for the white bears under black chasms of ice cliffs
While nonsense crawls up from the primordial zeitgeist of Facebook
Crawls on the bottom of the TV screen with royal family gossip
A prince spends some time on the subcontinent for charity flies home
What did she wear on the jetway? She refuses fur or leather. The bear
Barely walks now, stumbles, dies for want; a warm-water seal colony
Flings seagulls to the skies, mournful cries on the salt air.
The papers spit stats until we can’t feel them cut us
I worry when seabirds leave nests in the long grasses
The long grasses refuse to clutch the shores, wash away
We refuse to ignore where the nestlings burn in exhaust
We compost naked folded birds to grow the prize of silence
The long grasses let the sand wash them away, wind lift and disperse
The feathered steppes flatten, sink and subsume forever.
Doing whatever we need when we must and we must and we will
Champions born every minute ideas in flight to light at last on solid ground
With the fronds of the sea and the fears of a generation laid to rest.
Granddaughters’ daughters’ daughters’ roil in a thousand wombs
Where will they walk after the birthing squall sets them down
In the long grasses without the sheltering shores, without
The sister birds alive and alight in the trees, over waves?
Patty Tomsky 