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  • One Foot in: A Fake Artist’s Take on Death Faire – a blog by Scott Latimore

    One Foot in: A Fake Artist’s Take on Death Faire – a blog by Scott Latimore
  • Pecha Kucha – Fall 2019

    Pecha Kucha – Fall 2019
  • Spirit of Abundance

    Spirit of Abundance

One Foot in: A Fake Artist’s Take on Death Faire – a blog by Scott Latimore

November 14, 2019 By Scott Latimore Leave a Comment

One Foot in: A Fake Artist’s Take on Death Faire, by Scott Latimore

 

I have been working with the not-for-profit heart2heartnc for the past couple of months. With my diagnosis of stage four kidney cancer, this organization provides me with regular counseling as well as once-per-week Polarity Therapy sessions. Both activities have put me more in touch with myself as I live through the process of my death, and their experienced staff have taught me a lot about enjoying the day as it comes.

 

The Director of heart2heartnc, Cathy “Brooksie” Edwards, after finding out that I was an artist, put me in touch with Marcela Slade who runs Smelt Art Gallery at The Plant in Pittsboro, NC. Slade came up to Hillsborough for a studio visit, then asked me to contribute some work to their upcoming Death Faire. It was such an interesting disruption to my usual artistic process, that I wanted to say a little about how this show was different for me and how it altered the way I normally think about making artwork.

 

The end point of a painter’s labor is often exhibition. In the process of showing my work, I’ve always tried to hide my actual self through layers of fiction that then wind up contextualizing the images (see the “More About the Show” section behind the link for an example). I don’t want to be the front man, generally speaking. I find it more interesting when I concoct a personae to pretend to make the images, someone created by but also beyond me, what a novelist experiences with their characters, only through painting. A fake artist, if you will, for an era of fakeness.

 

However, with the opportunity to show my drawings at Death Faire, I wanted my contribution to point directly back to me as the creator. I needed a different approach, I think, because of the sacredness that I feel around the fact of death. Death is a departure from this world of a complex, networked self. It impacts people. I needed to keep this project from some of the irony I usually employ, so I oriented myself towards the autobiographical even as I was tempted to invent unreal narrative threads.

 

My friend Sebastian Matthews describing the aftermath of an automobile accident in his book, The Beginner’s Guide to a Head On Collision, wrote, “Let the words bruised heart blossom into their full, clear, un-ironic truth.” A similar revelation occurred to me as I was receiving a bone biopsy. I felt that there was nothing more real than that needle (with all of its questions) in the world. I wanted the work headed to Death Faire to honor these realities of cancer and car wrecks, together.

 

Still, I wound up having to compromise. When it comes to making artwork, I have an active stable of contrived, internalized personalities that have their say if ignored.

The series of drawings that I entered was a cartoon in six panels about my personal relationship to cancer treatment drugs. The images project my imagination trying to wrap its tendrils around what an TKI Inhibitor actually does. So I drew how the medicine I’m taking works without any pharmacological knowledge, using a grab bag of symbols that have been part of my visual language for years now. The finished drawings are nothing a research M.D. would recognize, but, for me, they represent a kind of flow chart into the future or a map of how I might survive just a little bit longer or maybe just a little bit better.

 

And, hopefully, the images themselves are ambiguous enough, the narrative open enough to allow viewers to partake in their own story as they witness the work. Substitute cancer medication for the thing that keeps you going every day. What would a cartoon of that look like?

Then there is the ground truth, the effects of the disease, death, sadness, pain. I don’t think that I would be able to show something so vulnerable and intentionally broken without the support of the people around me, both my family and the good folks who put on Death Faire.

 

To normalize death, have a parade around it. Take a selfie in a coffin. Launch a book about people’s tales of dying. All of this is critical work. Critical care for everyone. How can you live without it?


About the artist/author:

Scott Latimore is a painter and mixed media artist living and working in Hillsborough, NC.

Scott Latimore profile picture“My creative career began with writing but transitioned to visual arts around the turn of this century. Nevertheless, my visual work draws heavily from narrative, language, poetics, and persona. The paintings, drawings, and sculptures that I make often emerge from different characters and entities which are a part of the ever-evolving life-world of my experience as filtered through particular tropes and fictions. Landscape and imaginary cartography are the primary forms of this expression, and the materials I use reference conditions common to the language and life of these personae.”

You can find Scott’s artwork and his blog at scott-latimore.com

Filed Under: Abundance NewsTagged With: featured

News + Stories:

Old Raleigh, Old Awards and Old Wounds – a blog by Chef Kabui

May 16, 2019 By Njathi Kabui Leave a Comment

Recently, a friend in the food world shared two great bits of information that he believed should have been good news to me. First, Raleigh chef Ashley Christensen won the James Beard Foundation Award for the country’s Outstanding Chef at a ceremony held in Chicago at Lyric Opera. The second set of news was that… 

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Filed Under: Essays

Investing Locally and Building Community Wealth – A blog by Gabe Treves-Kagan

May 1, 2019 By Gabriel Treves - Kagan Leave a Comment

We are intentional about what we eat and where it comes from. We are thoughtful about where we shop and mindful of the labor that goes into what we consume.  But what about where we bank and how our money is being put to work?  We shop and eat local, but how many of us… 

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Filed Under: Essays

LOVE of Mother Earth – a blog by Godi Godar

April 17, 2019 By Godi Godar Leave a Comment

I am blessed to have grown up in the heart of the Congo Basin Rainforest my whole childhood, nurtured by Mama Earth. The Rainforest is our mother.  She provides us with all that we need: climate, shelter, medicine, water, food, the air we breathe and so much more. The resilience of her lungs are vital for… 

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Filed Under: Essays

Thank you for helping us meet our F4DC Match Grant!

April 4, 2019 By Alisa Esposito Leave a Comment

  Thank you! We met our match!  We asked for your help and you delivered!  Your small donations went a long way, matched dollar for dollar by F4DC, whose grantmaking got everyone involved! Your tax-deductible, gift right helped: Manifest and co-create a community modeled on love! Kept admission prices accessible to all. Send ripples through… 

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Filed Under: Abundance News

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Spirit of Abundance

It is with great honour that we announce our new video created by Bobby Bailey and team and produced by Frank Phoenix. It took months for the footage and to create this beautiful and emotional video. Our story of Abundance and how we got here. Please share and thank you.

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Alive and Crackling….

Alive and Crackling….

"...We have barely disembarked into life...we've only just now been born, let's not fill our mouths with so many uncertain names, with so many sad labels, with so many pompous letters, with so much yours and mine, with so much signing of papers. I intend to confuse things, to unite them, make them new-born intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling."
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