Asylum Garden

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Asylum Garden - after Van Gogh</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is a book about seeing: what we see and how we see it. The collection begins with the artist Van Gogh during his rest cure at an asylum following a general emotional and physical collapse. He begins to paint landscapes gardens peaceful scenes gradually internalizing what he sees. Upon his release his vision incorporates a whole new way of seeing: slightly altered landscapes and nightscapes everything off-center self-portraits showing a more fraught perhaps demented personality. Everything he does is emotionally charged and completely unique. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> As the word asylum implies where the artist resides is a place of refuge for the artist but it is also an institution. A mental institution with all its particular sets of rules regulations and treatments may range from the well-meaning but often unintentionally cruel to a place of outright torture. The artist is at rest the artist is tormented. Then the artist dies. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A peaceful elegiac scene in an-inspired-by-Whistler poem opens a door to another place. The artist undergoes a transmigration of the mind to where there is life in death and death in life. The later poems become a broad visualization a verbal journey through a perplexing world of the deep relationships between art and madness life in death.  </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A peaceful winter scene becomes an elegy death is a direction art is the tool of the imagination that takes you from familiar places to those places deep inside. The non-existent photographs direct the reader to see things that appear on the paper but exist only in the mind. Later actual photographs key responses that take you to particular places: times of upheaval and strife. We move through time and space a time of revolution chaos assassination and radical politics to where we live now on the edge where art and madness life and death meet in the imagination.</span></p><p></p>