Poignant and humorous, the piece above is from Fine Art, the pseudonym of an Escondido artist. The collage has a message synchronous to the short poem in my haiga piece below: "I am here. Where are you?" Mail art is, in a sense, a hope, a prayer, a shout into the valley. It is a symbolic message put into a bottle and set on the waves. It poses the very question asked in this collage: Is anyone out there? All those houses--yet it seems sometimes as if they might as well be uninhabited. Recently, I learned that ladybugs are sold by mail order to gardeners who set them loose to rid their plots of pests. The sociable swarm of insects depicted in the corner of this piece also makes its way to me by post, eating up the distance between me and its mysterious, unmet, and otherwise unknown sender, as well as the anonymity of all the blank-faced houses that lie between us; as the totemic spirit of this card, they brighten, metaphorically, my garden.
Aesthetically pleasing and playful, this card comes to me from Richard Canard. Elegantly composed, American Mona provides yet another turn on Leonardo's classic painting, draping art's all-time favorite poster girl in red-white-and-blue drag, making her a patriotic pin-up, just in time for Veteran's Day. Is this Duchampian iconoclasm? A pop art homage disguised as cool, Warholian parody? Or is it something darker? A sly political commentary on American Imperialism? A concentrated critique of the all-consuming, all-appropriating cancer that is capitalism at its worst?
Perhaps it is all this and more. Richard proves that Leonardo's masterpiece is still a living visual language; that it remains as fluid, useful, and powerful as ever.
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