The 0 Project Voices
0 is a rallying point for the voiceless of the world. It is a forum for issues both personal and of monumental consequence, that often are ignored. This is a chance to comment and become part of the ARCHIVES of the 0 Project.
You can post your comments online or write your comments in hand-made books available at Arlington Arts Center and other venues the 0 Project is exhibited.
The Voices
From: K.R. Strong
Date: December 24th, 2008
I cannot seem to shake the sense of fate that like a vulture sits on my shoulders, waiting and ravenous. At !9, it seems like so much work to live and can I be sure that I won’t end up like my mother and my father? No matter how much I rage against the dying of the light, I think I have already absorbed them. Am becoming them, Are them.
From: EMM
Date: December 24th, 2008
I remember doing woodcuts in high school and cutting away the negative space. The visceral nature of the experience was such a release and these works bring these same feelings back. These works are visceral and ache in my gut-thank you.
From: Shahla Arbabis from TF Book
Date: December 7th, 2008
I’m completly emersed in the concept of war, peace and proliferation - the power of it all to destroy mankind.
From: Arev
Date: December 7th, 2008
Rosemary, There is so much to shout about. I will start with the three Ms…money matters (the CEOs walking away with multi millions while their companies fail), music and art taken from our schools and towns because many of our local politicians are failing us, snd medicine and health care which is being dictated by insurance companies. I wish your O Project could be wrapped around our nation’s Capitol. Keep up your thought provoking and wonderful work!
From: David
Date: December 1st, 2008
Dear People
Please remember that Global Warming is for real and not a tell-tale story. Sometimes, you keep me sleepless.
Best regards,
David in Stockholm
From: Will
Date: November 20th, 2008
We express a lot of energy. what is it being expressed in the name of?
From: meablyboymn
Date: October 16th, 2008
Hello.
reflects the couple’s low-key approach to their royal connections.
Bye.
From: Jean
Date: August 27th, 2008
In an age of atrocities, it is still shocking to read about the disappearance and murder of 10,000 in Columbia. Killed by right wing death squads with relatives to frightened to appeal to the government, this is truly a voiceless crime
From: Arev
Date: August 6th, 2008
It is an outrageous miscarriage of justice to sentence the boarder patrol guards for doing their job and trying to stop a drug smuggler. It is especially outrageous to learn that the drug smuggler got a lesser sentence then the guards did. And, Senator Ted Stevens, you have taken so much illegal favors over the years while in the Senate, while so many Americans go hungry. Hopefully, the O Project is one way of hearing the voiceless. Let us hope they will be heard.
From: M. C. B.
Date: July 5th, 2008
Will you stop pushing my buttons? you know who you are. stop making my tiny mistakes seem so huge. stop making me feel horrible because i’m me. just because i’m happy, and because i think there’s good in this world, you have to make me miserable? i’m going to be me. i’m going to be happy. and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
From: T.J. Lavelle (Age 10 1/2)
Date: June 16th, 2008
World Population has been exploding in the past 500 years. In about 2000 the world’s population was about 6.4 billion. Now in 2008 world population is more than 8.1 billion! Studies show that if the population growth continues at this rate , then in 5000 years the earth will be a packed ball of human flesh expanding out at the speed of light!!!
From: Aidan (Age 8)
Date: May 14th, 2008
What has the world become? Why have we polluted it to the limit?We should have taken more care of our planet!Please, god, forgive us!The end is coming!
From: Aileen (from 0 Voices book)
Date: May 12th, 2008
Who will speak for those whose words are inaudible?
Those who we think are too different to speak the same language that we do. Those who cry tears that are never brushed away by the hand of another. Those who possess deepest beauty within.
From: Anhi Chi
Date: May 9th, 2008
0 my God!
What does the world have to say?!
I would like to know
From: Beah
Date: March 19th, 2008
The people of Tibet plead for their homeland. Will someone hear their voices?Will the U.N? Our small community of Tibetans and Tibetan college students are pleading for their freedom and for China to surrender from the esculating violence there. Another example of “voices unheard”.
From: Dana
Date: January 20th, 2008
I see so many images from anywhere and everything in the world.
* Charlie Chaplin movie
* Russian Revolution
* Detroit Auto Worker’s from the 1920’s
* Orwell’s “Down and Out in London and Paris”
* Old Photo’s from the 30’s Deppression
From: Heather Borra O'Donnell
Date: January 18th, 2008
Why do we teach about the holocaust in school if we do nothing about Darfur!? History is repeating itself and we are standing silent.
From: Beah
Date: October 26th, 2007
Rosemary, Maybe someone is listening! Today the young man who was sentenced to ten years for having consensual sex with a teenager (he was also a teen) will be relased from prison. His sentenced was overturned. Now if they would hear us before the drunken driver,who has been picked up five times before given a light sentence of two years in jail, kills someone. Where our are priorities? Keep up the good work
From: Robert Earle
Date: October 3rd, 2007
It seems to me that art finds its ground in three places–the artist’s vision, the artist’s mode of expression, and the viewer’s response.
Of these three aesthetic crossroads, the most important and fundamental is the artist’s vision. Over the course of Rosemary Covey’s career, she has excelled in producing specific, exact, narrative visions. Despite the fact that her work is graphic, embedded within an image, it has never been static. It tells tales; it reveals secrets by turning the world inside out, it generates a sense of “now,” “before,” and “next.” This is an artistic vision of empathetic commitment, regardless of place and time, nationality and class. The person or object rendered is something alive in the artist’s art and expresses a small cosmos of meanings and possibilities, many of them precarious.
I won’t try to rank the artist’s mode of expression or viewer’s response one over the other, but I’ll take them in the order I mentioned them.
Rosemary’s mode of expression traditionally has been a fairly small format wood engraving, a technique of which she is a master. The vitality of this technique is, in a sense, its fatality. Once a line is begun it has to live with its end and then coexist with all the other fierce, feathery, choppy, intricate lines that emerge from her vision into physical reality. That physical reality, the ultimate print, typically is unique, compelling, one-of-a-kind (although foruntately it inhabits a series of a few dozen iterations). Rosemary’s prints are completely and only Rosemary’s prints. Look at them on the website or visit her gallery. The vision and the mode of expression come together in shapes and lines as unique as fingerprints or DNA. What she wants to do and what is she able to do are one and the same. That takes enormous commitment–and given the power of Rosemary’s vision–enormous courage.
The O Project turns things on their head. This is a vision of what’s raw, what’s inchoate, what’s undifferentiated. Rosemary turns in specificity for sameness. Well, that can be as scary and menacing and disturbing as anything else she has done. Surprise, surprise, it’s perfect for large formats, huge formats, far bigger than anything she’s presented before. At this scale of revelation, the mode of expression must be skillfully, hauntingly generalized.
Is it still Rosmary at work? Undoubtedly and undeniably. Who else could have had this vision?
The viewer’s response: No powerful work of art leaves the viewer untouched or unchallenged. Wholeness hurts; it breaks down the flat planes of existence and makes them sharp; it stretches this way and goes deep that way. Art is not for art’s sake; it seeks the ground in each of us, the place where we normally stand, and shakes it under us, renewing and expanding us, making us jump, grow nervous, become reflective.
I cannot speak for everyone’s “viewer response” when it comes to the inscrutable O Project. I am very much not a man for crowds, but here I’m in one. Can I preserve my sense of irony? Can I hear anything I want to hear? Can I get out of this crowd? What do these massed, upturned faces mean? Are they sinister, without hope, wound up like so many expectant toy soldier pilgrims demanding that I give them an answer? I sense trouble percolating in this rhythmic generality. It gives me no refuge. Not a place I want to be, but definitely something I want to see.
From: Joe Kasimer
Date: September 25th, 2007
The multitude of faces in the 0 Project cry out against injustice, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy in the world. The faces, both detailed and vague, form an enormous mass of humanity which demands action— consistent with the public display of the art. The outcry has no shortage of topics in today’s society, whether the fact that people are hungry while we waste enough food in our trash dumpsters to feed them; or the fact that the voices of “family values” lead lives of grotesque hypocrisy; or the daily loss of American lives in Iraq based upon flawed initial premises and stubborn refusal to accept reality.
It is noteworthy that some of the faces of the 0 Project are quite detailed, while others are vague, misshapen or missing features. Have they been partially destroyed and diminished by the daily pain they suffer and the futility of their outcry? Or do they represent the moral ambiguity of so many causes?
In the end, the faces of the 0 Project cry out to us. Take a stand, shed indifference, volunteer effort and be involved. Otherwise we shall dissipate into the faceless, featureless existence that the art hints at.
Pages:
Make your voice heard
Make your voice heard by leavinga message on this site.
From: K.R. Strong
Date: December 24th, 2008
I cannot seem to shake the sense of fate that like a vulture sits on my shoulders, waiting and ravenous. At !9, it seems like so much work to live and can I be sure that I won’t end up like my mother and my father? No matter how much I rage against the dying of the light, I think I have already absorbed them. Am becoming them, Are them.
From: EMM
Date: December 24th, 2008
I remember doing woodcuts in high school and cutting away the negative space. The visceral nature of the experience was such a release and these works bring these same feelings back. These works are visceral and ache in my gut-thank you.
From: Shahla Arbabis from TF Book
Date: December 7th, 2008
I’m completly emersed in the concept of war, peace and proliferation - the power of it all to destroy mankind.
From: Arev
Date: December 7th, 2008
Rosemary, There is so much to shout about. I will start with the three Ms…money matters (the CEOs walking away with multi millions while their companies fail), music and art taken from our schools and towns because many of our local politicians are failing us, snd medicine and health care which is being dictated by insurance companies. I wish your O Project could be wrapped around our nation’s Capitol. Keep up your thought provoking and wonderful work!
From: David
Date: December 1st, 2008
Dear People
Please remember that Global Warming is for real and not a tell-tale story. Sometimes, you keep me sleepless.
Best regards,
David in Stockholm
From: Will
Date: November 20th, 2008
We express a lot of energy. what is it being expressed in the name of?
From: meablyboymn
Date: October 16th, 2008
Hello.
reflects the couple’s low-key approach to their royal connections.
Bye.
From: Jean
Date: August 27th, 2008
In an age of atrocities, it is still shocking to read about the disappearance and murder of 10,000 in Columbia. Killed by right wing death squads with relatives to frightened to appeal to the government, this is truly a voiceless crime
From: Arev
Date: August 6th, 2008
It is an outrageous miscarriage of justice to sentence the boarder patrol guards for doing their job and trying to stop a drug smuggler. It is especially outrageous to learn that the drug smuggler got a lesser sentence then the guards did. And, Senator Ted Stevens, you have taken so much illegal favors over the years while in the Senate, while so many Americans go hungry. Hopefully, the O Project is one way of hearing the voiceless. Let us hope they will be heard.
From: M. C. B.
Date: July 5th, 2008
Will you stop pushing my buttons? you know who you are. stop making my tiny mistakes seem so huge. stop making me feel horrible because i’m me. just because i’m happy, and because i think there’s good in this world, you have to make me miserable? i’m going to be me. i’m going to be happy. and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
From: T.J. Lavelle (Age 10 1/2)
Date: June 16th, 2008
World Population has been exploding in the past 500 years. In about 2000 the world’s population was about 6.4 billion. Now in 2008 world population is more than 8.1 billion! Studies show that if the population growth continues at this rate , then in 5000 years the earth will be a packed ball of human flesh expanding out at the speed of light!!!
From: Aidan (Age 8)
Date: May 14th, 2008
What has the world become? Why have we polluted it to the limit?We should have taken more care of our planet!Please, god, forgive us!The end is coming!
From: Aileen (from 0 Voices book)
Date: May 12th, 2008
Who will speak for those whose words are inaudible?
Those who we think are too different to speak the same language that we do. Those who cry tears that are never brushed away by the hand of another. Those who possess deepest beauty within.
From: Anhi Chi
Date: May 9th, 2008
0 my God!
What does the world have to say?!
I would like to know
From: Beah
Date: March 19th, 2008
The people of Tibet plead for their homeland. Will someone hear their voices?Will the U.N? Our small community of Tibetans and Tibetan college students are pleading for their freedom and for China to surrender from the esculating violence there. Another example of “voices unheard”.
From: Dana
Date: January 20th, 2008
I see so many images from anywhere and everything in the world.
* Charlie Chaplin movie
* Russian Revolution
* Detroit Auto Worker’s from the 1920’s
* Orwell’s “Down and Out in London and Paris”
* Old Photo’s from the 30’s Deppression
From: Heather Borra O'Donnell
Date: January 18th, 2008
Why do we teach about the holocaust in school if we do nothing about Darfur!? History is repeating itself and we are standing silent.
From: Beah
Date: October 26th, 2007
Rosemary, Maybe someone is listening! Today the young man who was sentenced to ten years for having consensual sex with a teenager (he was also a teen) will be relased from prison. His sentenced was overturned. Now if they would hear us before the drunken driver,who has been picked up five times before given a light sentence of two years in jail, kills someone. Where our are priorities? Keep up the good work
From: Robert Earle
Date: October 3rd, 2007
It seems to me that art finds its ground in three places–the artist’s vision, the artist’s mode of expression, and the viewer’s response.
Of these three aesthetic crossroads, the most important and fundamental is the artist’s vision. Over the course of Rosemary Covey’s career, she has excelled in producing specific, exact, narrative visions. Despite the fact that her work is graphic, embedded within an image, it has never been static. It tells tales; it reveals secrets by turning the world inside out, it generates a sense of “now,” “before,” and “next.” This is an artistic vision of empathetic commitment, regardless of place and time, nationality and class. The person or object rendered is something alive in the artist’s art and expresses a small cosmos of meanings and possibilities, many of them precarious.
I won’t try to rank the artist’s mode of expression or viewer’s response one over the other, but I’ll take them in the order I mentioned them.
Rosemary’s mode of expression traditionally has been a fairly small format wood engraving, a technique of which she is a master. The vitality of this technique is, in a sense, its fatality. Once a line is begun it has to live with its end and then coexist with all the other fierce, feathery, choppy, intricate lines that emerge from her vision into physical reality. That physical reality, the ultimate print, typically is unique, compelling, one-of-a-kind (although foruntately it inhabits a series of a few dozen iterations). Rosemary’s prints are completely and only Rosemary’s prints. Look at them on the website or visit her gallery. The vision and the mode of expression come together in shapes and lines as unique as fingerprints or DNA. What she wants to do and what is she able to do are one and the same. That takes enormous commitment–and given the power of Rosemary’s vision–enormous courage.
The O Project turns things on their head. This is a vision of what’s raw, what’s inchoate, what’s undifferentiated. Rosemary turns in specificity for sameness. Well, that can be as scary and menacing and disturbing as anything else she has done. Surprise, surprise, it’s perfect for large formats, huge formats, far bigger than anything she’s presented before. At this scale of revelation, the mode of expression must be skillfully, hauntingly generalized.
Is it still Rosmary at work? Undoubtedly and undeniably. Who else could have had this vision?
The viewer’s response: No powerful work of art leaves the viewer untouched or unchallenged. Wholeness hurts; it breaks down the flat planes of existence and makes them sharp; it stretches this way and goes deep that way. Art is not for art’s sake; it seeks the ground in each of us, the place where we normally stand, and shakes it under us, renewing and expanding us, making us jump, grow nervous, become reflective.
I cannot speak for everyone’s “viewer response” when it comes to the inscrutable O Project. I am very much not a man for crowds, but here I’m in one. Can I preserve my sense of irony? Can I hear anything I want to hear? Can I get out of this crowd? What do these massed, upturned faces mean? Are they sinister, without hope, wound up like so many expectant toy soldier pilgrims demanding that I give them an answer? I sense trouble percolating in this rhythmic generality. It gives me no refuge. Not a place I want to be, but definitely something I want to see.
From: Joe Kasimer
Date: September 25th, 2007
The multitude of faces in the 0 Project cry out against injustice, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy in the world. The faces, both detailed and vague, form an enormous mass of humanity which demands action— consistent with the public display of the art. The outcry has no shortage of topics in today’s society, whether the fact that people are hungry while we waste enough food in our trash dumpsters to feed them; or the fact that the voices of “family values” lead lives of grotesque hypocrisy; or the daily loss of American lives in Iraq based upon flawed initial premises and stubborn refusal to accept reality.
It is noteworthy that some of the faces of the 0 Project are quite detailed, while others are vague, misshapen or missing features. Have they been partially destroyed and diminished by the daily pain they suffer and the futility of their outcry? Or do they represent the moral ambiguity of so many causes?
In the end, the faces of the 0 Project cry out to us. Take a stand, shed indifference, volunteer effort and be involved. Otherwise we shall dissipate into the faceless, featureless existence that the art hints at.
Pages:
Make your voice heard
Make your voice heard by leavinga message on this site.