The Mississauga Civic Centre: Photo Exhibit

Here is my most recent exhibition at the Mississauga Central Library,as well as my previous two.

All posted at Ontario Views

The World According to Greta

I imagine that Greta must be really difficult to get along with. Her sense of importance, her grandiose view of herself, must distance her, and even ridicule her, in the eyes of her contemporaries (that is other sixteen-year-olds).

Sure, she has been abducted by nefarious and evil adults, who will toss a child to Moloch's grasping octopus arms. But she also set the stage.

People are often too ready to excuse children.

By age seven or eight, there is already an established sense of right and wrong, even in children who were raised otherwise.

God's word, God's message, is an intuitive message. Right and Wrong are certainly culturally learned, but they are also innate to all human beings, and I believe as young as seven, and even younger.

Ask a child if he has lied, and he will go through a whole convoluted theatrics of "No! He hasn't!" with the incriminating evidence right beside him. It may be the degree of sophistication that is different between adults and children, but not the knowledge itself.

So, Greta, now no longer the eleven-year-old child who "started" this movement but a young sixteen-year-old woman, may be surrounded by hordes of malevolent adult allies, but she alone comes up with the Truth herself.

Her "climate change" message has NOT resonated with the political and cultural elite. Television shows are mocking her, and she is under no "youth" protection to NOT be mocked, having put herself in that limelight.

And even the Nobel Prize which she lost, and which I think digs much deeper than she lets on, is better off without her. And perhaps her continued perseverance, her insistence, was spiked by this loss. "The World Hates Me And Here's The Proof."

The Nobel Prize for Peace winner, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has been thankfully removed from the spotlight because of this narcissistic young woman and her entourage, and he can continue the serious matter of leading his country removed from the malevolent eyes of the Western world, whose communist/liberal leaders would sabotage his Meddemer movement if they weren't so skillfully distracted by this new "religious" icon.

Do not be afraid to critique, and to criticize, "young" children. The normal step would be of course to remove them and put them in the proverbial corner, or mete out some other appropriate punishment.

But in our Brave New World, shine the light on Greta's narcissistic needs and let her lead those marches, allow her to speak in her disjointed language, permit her to proclaim rude messages to world leaders.

Meanwhile, an important revolution is happening at the other end of the world, which Greta in her arrogance has dismissed. After all, who cares about Africa when there are real global climate issues to contend with.

This, as usual, is the disguised racist stance of Western countries, mostly liberals, who will tag on religiously to a fraudulent icon while dismissing the lives and hopes, and dreams of change of a country far away in the dark continent of Africa.

Greta is cleverer than you think, and she is out to get what she wants. We are not quite sure what that is...yet.

Good Vs. Evil

Call Me Jen

Reclaiming Beauty has always been about popular culture, as a non-elitist stand which pulls ordinary people, and others, into a world of beauty, culture, and society, that aims to prevail over the nihilism that is (I believe deliberately set-up) part of our contemporary world.

So, let's go into the real pop culture, a world which the Walmart checkout lines display in full view. Where young women scan assiduously as they get ready to buy the next edition of InStyle for the exorbitant price of a book - that's $9 Canadian for me.

One of my favorite actresses, Jennifer Aniston, is back into the real world.

She suffered a lot. Her husband, the handsome Brad Pitt, and by all accounts the love of her life, abandoned her for that evil woman, Angelina Jolie. You don't believe me? Then look at what Jolie is up to these days (image courtesy of the movies), in her new movie Malfecent: Mistress of Evil.


Angelina Jolie in the second edition of the movie Maleficent, with her Devil's horns

Jennifer was engaged to someone else - a second-rate actor, nowhere near the talent of Pitt (at least in his pre-Jolie, pre-global adoption years) - but apparently broke it off.

She is now back on track, looking as young and fresh as Rachel Green, in her Friends days, a show of which I was a great fan, only to see what was the latest outfit that the photogenic and charismatic Rachel (aka Jennifer) wore.



Poor Rachel. She was cast with these wimpy, erratic men, more "female" than her. But she, in her wisdom, never outshone them unless it was in dress or in her ability to get out of their pathetically induced difficult situations. Jennifer ALWAYS came out on top.

Now, Brad Pitt is back in the market. I think he's super handsome, which may have been his Achilles heel. He was in some late night talk show recently, and he did pretty well.



Jennifer can win him back. Cleverly, and with femininity.

She is, after all a Single Woman, and he an eligible (divorced/separated) bachelor.

And Jolie, against whom Aniston never uttered a SINGLE malevolent word, is out making her witching tale, conniving with the Devil and his horns, and a new edition of her film franchise Malefecent.

I hope her Ethiopian adopted daughter turns to Pitt (her adopted father), and to Jennifer, for her salvation.

Blasphemy With the Poor

Matthew 26: 6-11

6 Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper,

7 There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.

8 But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?

9 For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.

10 When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me.

11 For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.

12 For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.

13 Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.

Zanele Muholi (South Africa)
Miss D’Vine II, 2007
From the series Miss D’vine
Chromogenic print

The image above is from the exhibition The Way She Looks: The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, a photography exhibit on photographs by and of African women at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC).

The exhibition's photographs were assembled from the Walther Collection

RIC Facebook page here
RIC web page here

A perverted, selected, imagery of African Women

Real Beauty
From the exhibition: The Way She Looks
At the Ryerson Image Centre

The gyrating "African Woman," exploited by those who claim to be on her side, but who voyeuristically inspect her every fold of fat, which feed in nicely into their "African Woman as Our Savior" discourse.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time"

Fall Leaf Patterns
[Photo Collage By: KPA]

Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time.

African Woman

Jodi Bieber
Babalwa, from the series Real Beauty
2008, pigment print

Above image from the Ryerson Image Centre exhibition: The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, on view also at the RIC website, and other publications such as Canadian Art. More information at the RIC Facebook page.


African Woman,
Dj Shimza (South Africa)

Paul Edward Costa: Mississauga Poet Laureate

A Line of Poets
By: Paul Edward Costa

A baton touches my hand when it swings back
and in an instant
I’m not a solitary runner on a cracked desert;
it slowly dawns on me that I never have been,
I’m linked to a train
reaching from the cool, steady hand
passing this position to mine,
all the way back to poets who set
the vivid life of city states into history and permanence,
cast lassos in the air,
caught ethereal spirits and emotions
floating above the heads of people
in squares of celebration
and set them into the shapes of runes lighting up
when you read them and see a sensation you’ve always felt
but never had verified
by the reality of a concrete shape.

I pray I leave behind
not just a record of words
but a poetic spark in more souls
than those who know they have such a lightning inside them,
that I hope grows into a fire of minds
fiercely expressing their free identities
and setting lines of future poets aflame
with the responsibility of their art’s capacity
for commemoration,
celebration,
reminding,
remembering,
and encapsulating the dynamic realities of this place,
this time.

The Monarch

[Photos By: KPA]

I've been dormant for a while.

I am back!

A lot has been going on. Mostly character building.

Here are photographs of the Monarch Butterfly, which is leaving us (Canada). I caught its fluttering wings in the beautiful Jubilee Garden in Mississauga a couple of days ago. It was a stroke of luck. The whole garden was full of these butterflies, which seem to like yellow: I was guaranteed to find several on the yellow flower.

I went a couple of days later, and the garden was eerily quiet. Although the butterfly flutters were silent, their sound was left to my imagination. I could still hear them.

The monarch is a metaphor, a butterfly that endures thousands of miles to get to the place where it wishes to remain to regain strength for a journey back to its home.

It is also about the intertwined history, culture and nature of Canada and America, something which I have always believed, and always written about.

I will follow the monarch's treacherous path path in my blog, as I always have, through my posts, views, opinions, perspectives and writings.

And how can I resist regaining, refueling, my blog by announcing this unexpected, and regal visitor.

The monarch becomes a metaphor for endurance, principle, and a goal to be accomplished.

All that Reclaiming Beauty is about.

Truth

1 John 4:6

We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

Black is Blurry

It's extraordinary that a black woman would depict herself in this manner.

Images below are from the current Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition: Sandra Brewster Blur, and Brewster's web page.

Art of the Gimmick Khee / Lee

Khee Lo - using a windshield wiper to produce circular "radials

Similar to Chinese brush painting where the wrist pulls paint across

Same with

Hyeran Lee's Eleventh Correlation "with it's generous sweeping brushstrokes"

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Sunset

A post shared by Reclaiming Beauty (@reclaimbeautyk) on Jun 30, 2019 at 5:21pm PDT

Beautiful Logo

The beautifully designed "tail wing" logo of the Ethiopian Airlines

Magnolias at the City Centrr

[Photo By: KPA]