The Omen Project
Origins
The Beings who inhabit the 5th Dimension are not happy with humanity, I can tell you that, and frankly who can blame them?
Enrico Fermi - commenting on the conjecture that the universe being so old, and galaxies filled with billions of stars, should be teaming with life - once famously asked “Where is everyone?”
Well, would you want to talk to a bunch of murderous, crazed animals like humanity?
Donald Rumsfeld, spoke of ‘War Without End’ as if we hadn’t already been at War without end, when have we not been at war? Empire building - Slavery and Jim Crow, the Native Genocide, Nuclear War - the great American Trinity.
SETI scientist’s have tried to send a message to alien civilizations, and would like to do so again, but personally I would send an S.O.S. or a Warning. However, the more likely circumstance is that we are under quarantine, lest we infect the universe with our plague of insanity.
These are conflicting notions of humanity, one searching for life, the other self-destructive. We are a schizophrenic civilization - brother, fighting brother, oppressing and abusing women, mothers, wives, destroying the Earth while looking for life elsewhere. Obsessing over the love lives of others. Loosing ones own love and life with fear, hate and greed for the ‘other.’ Recapitulating the story of Odysseus again and again.
The Omen Project, is an incantation, a constellation of works, and a puzzle connecting two worlds, Love & Horror. Centered on the synthesis of The Iliad & The Odyssey with Star Trek The Motion Picture - the separation of the heart and the mind.
While I had begun this work prior to 911, and the ensuring wars, with them the import of this theme became all the more clear - without love, the actions of mankind may become brutal, and life resolved to a stark and cold isolation without meaning or care.
So while for 25 years I have been making art about a man who is leaving life, I am now looking to find him, searching for what has been forgotten by this Odysseus of Outer Space. Nemo, has been in hiding for many lifetimes but it is now time to come forward and wake the dead. The Trinity nuclear test, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be seen as either a warning or a death knell, this depends upon humanity waking up before the Earth cleanses her self of this vile infection.
Where did the Omen Project come from?
In 1997 I was in art school and taking a class on Fluxus, with an assignment of ‘book art,’ take a book and alter it in some way as a work of art. What I made was The Body of Light as seen above. I had come to the idea of the Body of Light after a dream experience I had in 1994, when I believe that I was visited in the dream by a ‘mystical’ elder who had died that night. I had met him through a Buddhist monk friend earlier in the year, which in itself was an odd experience. In my Anthropology research (rather my extra reading as a student studying Shamanism and Esoterica) as a student at SFSU I had come across what I feel is the teaching received, that of the Body of Light or the Clear Light teaching - we are all made of light and will return into that light.
As a child I studied Physics and Astronomy and J. Robert Oppenheimer was a hero of mine. So the Trinity Experiment and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very familiar to me. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s Nuclear War and Nuclear disarmament was a big topic. I like many was shocked by the movie The Day After, which aired on ABC in 1983, depicting the after effects of a nuclear attack. We are no safer today than we were then, we are perhaps even at an even larger danger today than we were then.
A ghostly and frightening effect of the Nuclear Bombing of Hiroshima was the creation of what are known as the Human Shadow of Death, or Blast Shadow. This is caused by the light and heat of the bomb burned (bleached) the stone while leaving the area cast by the shadow darker. While legend says that the body was vaporized this is impossible, bones and carbonized organs would have remained, attested by a soldier who claimed to have retrieved the remains.
It is this the Human Shadow of Death that I connected to the Body of Light, may the dead rest in peace.
Somewhere between the heart and the mind something went wrong.
Wake Up.
I am burning from the inside, the sun and the moon collide; open the flesh.