by the dawn's early light.

In a recent post of mine I mentioned Bob Ross, the TV painter of landscape fame and cheesy art stereotypes across the board. Well reading the catalog for Manifest Destiny/ Manifest responsibility Mr. Ross came back to my mind. The idea of these paintings becoming a reminder or a visual record of what our surroundings used to look like, is too much of a possibility at this point. The cheesy and "arteest" stigma that this kinda work carries in contemporary culture is a weird paradox to how this work may be rethought. the fact that these images , oaintings, are being incorporated into an exhibition addressing current issues as referrence to not only how things once stood but of how much admiration and allure they held in the begining to start with is a weir dturn of events that I think is fascinating here. Typically I would walk past this kind of work and dissmiss it as just another image that would make a great puzzle but this is the power of words and pictures and how they corrilate in forming a complex dialougue of things that we may deem mundane or too common.

In the Art 21 video for the fourth season, Mark Dion made a remark which I think is not common in the way people perceive the condition of the enviroment and earth's future He said something arround the lines of us being in a place were we are in a game in which if we win we et to keep the earth, but how he did not think we ha d a very good chance of achieving that at the moment. Ok, this to me is insanely interesting. This comment is to me not necessarily pessimistic in nature but more so realistic and in a sense a comforting honest evaluation of the situation. It is often my belief that the voice whihc we all get our information from, wether it be the news, newspaper, professors, etc, is not the absout truth and that is very seldomly challenged. In respect to the issues that this particular exhibition wishes to address I think its important to note how in context is responsable material thought to the community. what do we deem important enough to care about? What will make the soccer mom stop driving her hummer to pick up her kids only to dorp them off to the nanny kind scenario? What will make the clerk at Ace Hardware realize why I was in such disgust and horror at the fact that after I said no bag for my purchases please, she threw the bag she was about to give me dirrectly into the garbage? Education is key and I feel it is not "manifested" correctly and appropriately too often.

While flipping through the images of Manifets Destiny Manifest repsonsability I came to mind of particular bit of a Simpsons episode. I dont recall the scenario of the episode much but basically the image is of a man kicking a machine on the floor outside of an educational building and a hologram of a tree appearing. there is a sign next to this which reads in memory of a real tree. Ok in the text we came accross references to early discussion of the enviroment and how it is not necessarily a new thing to note. the Simpsons eisode in itself is but 14 years old at most and that is still a time when the trend of Green was not such well a trend.