#homothetic

[salonshop]

Roman Mitch, Missing Person, 2003

Oil on canvas

60.8 x 50.5 cm

–

Penelope Sue, The Search, 2019

Cotton thread, plastic buttons on archival tape

198 x 1.8 x 0.9 cm

–

Homothetic (APB), 2019 

Commissioned by Mokopōpaki, 2019

Photo: Arekahānara

[salonshop]

Homothetic (APB), 2019

Detail

Commissioned by Mokopōpaki, 2019

Photo: Arekahānara

[salonshop]

Jane Zusters, Maya and Rosalie, 1976

Silver gelatin print

40.5 x 40.5 x 1.5 cm framed

–

Teghan Burt, Note Page Painting, 2018–19

Acrylic, watercolour pen on canvas

40.5 x 50.7 x 1.5 cm

–

Homothetic (Greenhouse 1), 2019

Commissioned by Mokopōpaki, 2019

Photo: Arekahānara

[salonshop]

Homothetic (Greenhouse 1), 2019

Detail

Commissioned by Mokopōpaki, 2019

Photo: Arekahānara

[salonshop]

Homothetic (Greenhouse 1), 2019

Detail

Commissioned by Mokopōpaki, 2019

Photo: Arekahānara

[lorienpatton]

homothetic (Aug 31, 2007)

In the Beginning: Darkness. Cold.

The shaman is the first explorer.

In her body she holds the poison trying different deaths until she finds the way.

The formula, the ritual these she teaches to the strange girl child she has adopted.

At the shaman’s death journey to be with the ancestors, the girl child Yume (Dream) is revealed as Priestess Prophet Sacred Whore.

She brings the message unto all the people, with her blood, her body.

And in some few bright souls her gift would take root and bear fruit: an artist.

The artist would suffer, as they so often do. In their blood and pain the message goes forth.

Chemical, flesh of their own. All who consume and understand become the artist’s thought children.

They go forth and build the message, the ritual, the formula into everything they touch.

And when the ruins of their history are plundered, the artwork/message goes out unto a new people.

They go to their own artists and ask them to help. To learn to interpret the message in this strange artwork.

So they try. Learn. Guess. Make wild leaps of the imagination.

And at last one of these alien artists makes the change.

She realizes that her people are not alone in the darkness.

She begins to seek and teaches her daughters to do the same once she is gone.

The message writers must be out there somewhere. ∻

----------- COMMENTARY: In late 2007 I was living in a shed in the hills north of Los Angeles, CA. It did not have plumbing, but I had permission to draw on the walls, which I did... a lot. I wish I had pictures, but all of the possessions which were with me then are lost to the vagaries of the universe, so memories will have to suffice.

This particular poem was written in Sharpie directly on the wall, no pre-planning, in a meditative state of non-judged stream of consciousness poetry generation. I started my line of poetry above the front door, and wrote all the way around the structure back to the top of the door.

When I completed the pome there were a few characters worth of empty space, which I filled with a 'decorative element' that looked like a wavy division sign. After I'd stared at that character for a while, I thought it might be an actual mathematical symbol, and went looking for the definition.

I found Unicode Character (U+233B), which is 'Homothetic", in the mathematical operators block. Wikipedia has this to say about Homothetic Transformations: “In mathematics, a homothety (or homothecy, or homogeneous dilation) is a transformation of an affine space determined by a point S called its center and a nonzero number λ called its ratio, which sends... “ after that my eyes started bleeding... you know. Math.