The Substitute Daughters of Wilhemina

                                                                                                                          SOLD

(Acrylic Paint and gesso on a 6" x 9" unstretched acrylic canvas sheet glued to latex paper)

This painting explores how grief and desire torment us with their doppelgangers, substitutes and mirages for something or someone no longer apparently there.


"The Substitute Daughters of Wilhemina"
by Tiffany Osedra Miller
Copyright 2010
all rigths reserved.

Storybook Libation

acrylic ink and paint on an approximately 6 and 3/4" x 6" linen canvas sheet.

I created this piece as an illustration for this vignette:

STORYBOOK LIBATION

Most nights and on some mornings, I wake up to find seven spiders dangling above me as I lay in my cold bed. I can never recall whether or not they emerged from one of the webs hidden deep in the neighborhoods and boroughs of those planets called Dust or if they rose like eight-legged saviors from beneath my dry, frigid skin. They didn't often look like spiders either. They more resembled carousel horses straddled and driven nowhere but in circles by what appeared to be eunuchs wearing nothing but soldier helmets.

The remnants of a spider carousel existed one summer in the basement of the basement of one of the country churches of my youth. I was sure no one else knew of its existence but me and those savior-soldiers who rode their horse-spiders during church services.

From my shelter behind a long abandoned pulpit, I watched those seven beings crawl down webs they'd woven, lead their horse-spiders in unison and then gather together and speak quietly amongst themselves once they reached the floor. They continued this way until one of them let out a long, high note and then they all joined in with a musical overture to precede their ride. To hear them sing in such a state!

As I watched them, the savior-soldiers appeared to me fully clothed in skin and uniform in one moment. In the next, I was accosted with the image of them in various stages of decay; their wounds, black holes or deep fissures impressed on their skeletons. And even in my youth, I understood while watching them, that this was their burial ground.

That summer, I marveled that I could hear the voice of the preacher from so deep within the earth's core where I was. I distinctly remember one Sunday morning as I watched the relentless ride of those soldiers, hearing the Father say: "Forget the five lives of starfish, the nine lives of cats, and the one sinful life you lead and recall, instead, the eight lives of spiders, the eight legs of horses, the high song of eunuchs and the sad spirits of soldiers."

by Tiffany Osedra Miller/aka Bassagirl
Copyright 2010

The News

"The News"
(Mixed media on 8 and 1/2" x 11" lightweight vellum paper)
by Tiffany Osedra Miller

The Leaning Candle of Jesus

THE LEANING CANDLE OF JESUS:
An autobiographer's ruminations
on some of what caused
the "Violent Beauty of Urda Louise"

The last night you lit
The Leaning Candle of Jesus
to talk to the spirit traveling
inside the body of that
Giant, neglected, wax figurine,
an old film of His superhumanity
genuflected in the reels of his eyes and
He showed you a version of Himself
sitting among his own small section of pews
inside the Church buried inside you
the one that you can get to only when you rise
from beneath a body of reservoir water.
-This Baptism your reward for
shooting heroin into your veins
two times with your boyfriend, Charlie's, pistol
while touring your shadow through a
crack house
that you didn't expect to re-enter.
You had been hailing Mary a long time then
from that sterile mattress you were born on
that became the filthy mattress that supported you
while your spirit dressed in storefront smoke
tried to fly
calling out to Mary
never thinking that
anyone, let alone Mary or your Mother would come.
You never suspected that you would meet your dead mother mourning,
while soaked in Funeral colors
her spirit accentuated with
a wide brim hat and veils.
She sits alone inside
The Leaning Candle of Jesus Church
mesmerized by a stationary hologram
of that image of Jesus programmed into all of us.
"Your unhappiness is murdering me, further" she says,
when you ask her why she sits all alone.
You say, unhappy? who?
You think right then of that handsome underwater astronaut -
the immaculate man-fish who pulled you out from the skeletal grasp
of Charlie Christ's arms,
through the narrow crack of that house
into warm soapy sea water
- the one who said
"underwater astronauts are your able bodied angels, Urda,
and we are here just for troubled ones like you-"
when you had been hailing your Mother and Mary
and Jesus had become just a low flame for your pipe.
But what of rites, wrongs, religions and rituals, you wonder,
and passages along the base of the pyramidal volcano
that ancient, ailing, addicted street archaeologists
dug up between corroded alleyways
that mirrored the rope of their veins.
Passages that lead to narrower streets
flanked by cobblestone tenements
with black windows
and the enormous
crumbling floor-less church
with the nodding, cracked congregation
shooting up heroin, collectively, in the undercroft.
Do such saviors have solstices, too?
If aliens teach our children Sunday school
and the only place for African ritual exists
through the corridors that appear behind
unused church altars - if you search carefully -
where on the other side
you watch African women dive into and emerge from
the earth as if the earth is the wild woman's water,
while your mother sits alone in the ruined belly of the church
calling out to you with her entire heart
"know and recognize your Father, Jesus - "
The miracle man you can only remember embodied
inside a large wax candle, deformed, maligned and leaning
-while your mother mourns your neglect of religion
for your interest in what she calls ignorance and idols
believing that it is the absence of Jesus
and not her decay, disintegration, and death
that causes the sadness in you.



poems and images by: Tiffany Osedra Miller
1st image, "Unbelievable" acrylic ink, india ink on 6" x 9" latex paper.

Purchase "Unbelievable," HERE.

2nd image, "The Leaning Candle of Jesus" oil pastels on 8 1/2" by 11" lightweight vellum paper

The Aliens Born of Immigrants

"The Aliens Born of Immigrants"
Acrylic ink and acrylic paint on a 6" x 6.5" linen canvas sheet

Bellicosa

"Bellicosa"
by Tiffany Osedra Miller/aka Osedra/aka Bassagirl
acrylic ink and acrylic paint on approx. 7" x 6" linen

CLick here for more information

Revelations, Revelry, Triumph then Decay

Image created by: Tiffany Osedra Miller/aka Osedra/aka Bassagirl

India ink and pen on 6" x 9" latex paper.

Artistic Process: "The Winners," version 2

After doing the initial sketch (that you will find in the post beneath this one) I decided to add color to the image. I used india ink, acrylic ink and acrylic paint all on moleskine paper. I got a little carried away. The paper wrinkled quite a bit but I've grown to like the effect. I liked the initial black and white image but I was bothered, even though this was a notebook sketch, by the stray pencil and pen markings and the places where, if you look closely, you can see the white out. I'm deciding whether or not to develp this into a bigger piece on canvas panel using acrylic paint and pen. I like the carnivalesque costumes and the expressions on their faces.

Artistic Process: "The Winners," Version 1

I created this sketch in my Moleskine notebook using, pencil, ink and white out.

Seven

"A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.” Federico Fellini

This painting is called, "Seven."

I drew "Seven" in my sketchbook, yesterday, with pencil and pen then painted it with acrylic and ink. After staring at it for awhile and hearing the number, "Seven", in my head, twice, I decided to call it that.

You Must Exit

"You Must Exit"
acrylic ink, india ink and pen on 6" x 9" latex impregnated paper. Click here for more information.

Number 26 to Memphis

                                                               SOLD

The Number 26 train to Memphis
hovers above ladder-tracks
laid down by the indigenous
inside of visions in which they saw themselves
climb each rail across the world.
If you board the Number 26, now,
the conductor will drive you through a state
of abandoned, yet occupied railroad cars
fossilized in mass open graves.

Regarding your luggage:

Tourist -
life already stores inside you
the sands of Memphis,
the gyrations of Elvis
the Libations of Africans,
the base desires in your blues,
the post-Lenten carnivals inherent in your jazz.

Regarding fare dodging, the
Members of The Subterranean Indigenous Tourist Board
wish to tell you this:

scavengers and passengers
must and will pay,
scavengers and passengers
must and will pay.

And, if while sleeping in your sleeping car
a gaggle of horns wakes you,
screaming out in a cacophony of sorrow,
open your door to a procession
led by face masked marauders,
their plastic expressions altered
by fire-light from candles.
Join that army of perversely masked
women and men,
raising back into life
the sarcophagus of the world they carry.

Tracks and Tunnels can then
become the open road for
trains traveling over, under and through
the imaginations of
all cities called and not called Memphis.

The original "Number 26 to Memphis" painting is on sale here.

Formaldehyde Mind Wagon

Formaldehyde Mind Wagon

Calling all Stained Glassed Street Soldiers
Your ancestor's visions are dying with your limited sight.
Challenge Rigor Mortis or Dance with Him.
Your Bacchanal is not a band-aid for burdens
dragging you through carnival beams.
You must encounter the spirits of jump-up
and wear the masks of friends and enemies -
Before this:
Develop an inner vision addiction.

This 8 and 1/2" by 11" original oil pastel, pencil and ink painting is for sale here.

The Bishop of Sorrow and Pink

The Bishop of Sorrow
and Pink
his blood a mix of brown
and whte rum,
opium and delirium
his courtesans call him
stubborn when he
threatens to but does
not shoot himself with his
gun. A former soldier
infinite clown
man statue with soul
mummified in skin and
bone. Enslaved Saint
situated on Sad Street
clutching pink, his carnival
color, childhood fable, his
sweet story
sung in sermon.

Mother's New Wings

The last time I dreamt of my mother was a few days ago. She was dancing on a stage with three other women whom I didn't recognize. In the dream I remembered thinking I never knew she could move this way. The time before that I dreamt of her holding me, embracing me on an evening when I felt like I was the loneliest, unhappiest woman in the world. When I woke up from this dream I felt invigorated, hopeful, refreshed. I have since began embracing my new relationship with my mother. Though she is bodiless, I feel her energy. She wanders inside the spaces of my art and more than ever I love her - what she was and what she is now. Where in life I had closed doors on her in my heart and mind, those places are now fully open. I do not merely love the memory of her. I love the freedom inside of where she lives without the weight of what life and circumstances eventually did to her body. Her new presence inspires me to find the newfound freedom she has while I am in the prime of my life. The freedom we all seek to be our complete unfettered selves. It is a way I have found to honor the legacy of my ancestors.

I was a dreamer long before I claimed the identity of an artist. I was fortunate enough to be born into a family that encouraged me to achieve my brightest dreams. From the time that I was a small child I was taught by my parents that anything was possible. Learning at a young age that anything is possible meant that I was somewhat prepared for both greatness and devastation.

Though I long to feel the reality of my mother's physical arms wrapped around me just one more time to make me feel loved, forgiven and safe, I cherish those arms that embraced me in my dreams a couple of months ago far more. It has always been her spirit I've wanted to cling to the most. Her sense of humor, her imagination, her beauty, her wisdom, her grace. And while, just over a year later, I am still sad and at times angry that she, in the way I remember her, is no longer here, I think of her as she was a few days ago, dancing with such liberty with other women on a stage, and I recall the eternal reality of movement in any time, form or space, from one place to another.

Tiffany Osedra Miller (aka Bassagirl)
Mother's Day, 2009

Calypsonian Blues Woman

Calypsonian Blues Woman

Calypsonian Blues Woman,
What is your death to me?
Is it America, Antigua,
England or Africa-
Catholic or Episcopal
Yoruba or Obeah?

I see the same colors now
that I saw from your womb.
I feel the march of painted stilt walkers
And marvel how their faces
Nearly reach the sun.
I hear the chant of the steel pan
And the blow of the bugle in
The old man’s final whistle-

Mother, I am missing you.
Clowns, jesters, and the beautiful
Are not supposed to die.

In me is carnival again
Bittersweet masquerade
Innocence and nakedness.
We were always, to ourselves,
deformed and abnormal
burned by the sun,
on your beach by the sun
and by our South Bronx window when
our borough was burning -
on the altar
by the flame, by the flame, by the flame
by the fire in the sores covering
every bit of your flesh
-these blemished my life.

Mother, I am longing for you.
Queens, Revelers and Soldiers
Are not supposed to cry.

I listen, now, to what’s left of you.
I, daughter and reveler, raise high
Your image on carnival streets
which run the labyrinths of my veins
Bleeding and guiding each color in my blood.
My mask, so like yours,
red as the Indian, white as the European,
Black as the African.
We both genuflected for Jesus,
yet moved our entire bodies
To the boom of the drum.

Me, your new world, ‘pickney,’
Sunk with your death,
Watch carnival trains of passing mourners
Rich revelers and poor revelers
Revelers dressed in clothes of white powder
Tattoos of ha’pennies glisten on their bare backs.
Death they mock and dishonor
For they are dead, too, this reminding me,
Mother, as you have said
Mumbling from behind your masquerade,
‘Life, my granddaughter-daughter, is the mask we wear.’

Come back to me, now Mother,
The swan only pretended to sing your final song
Your final song should include the ping-ping-ping
Of steel pans, the shout of horns
exploding your name into Bacchanal,
the call from the trumpet
and the singing voice of your own bodily departed Mother,
the music of African and Antiguan kisses,
the clamoring of belly laughs –
language of revelers whose image, like you,
they see reflected back to them
against the night’s colored face.

Mother, I still listen to you.
I catch your whispers
As they walk across the sky.

Dream of me, Mommy, dancing in your womb,
Knowing that I, too, was an immigrant
from the precious, soil of your body
–Your beautiful body, you once carried
with African Royalty and English pride.
Dream of me, Mommy,
dancing in your new-spirit womb
Energized by carnival light
Basking in Torment, yet dancing, towards Joy.
Come back to me, Mother,
and while I sleep
Give me just one piece of your strength,
move me with the spirit of your new Calypso.
Come kiss forever your grieving daughter,
Leave pieces of heaven on her cheeks.

by Bassagirl (aka Osedra)

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant.

Concerning the daughter of a dead immigrant
Whose mother lives alone, now, in some hut in some jungle
found on a map that is difficult to locate
If you still walk or crawl the world.
Her mother is alive in a Technicolor sense.
She lives without her body but within her daughter.
She whittles figurines of this daughter
Out of fantastic wood and debris from broken glass found on floors
of Countries with Carnivals.
The hut is supported by a statue of her daughter
Wearing the headdress of Three Mary’s:
Maria and Magdalene and Marriage,
Her wood-skin tinged with red,
And sodden with rum
The Mother costumes her in wedding dress and crown
In celebration of having joined the wisdom of spirit to this living young woman
Made in her mother’s likeness.
The walls of the hut also stand wooden with her daughter
And the ceiling shows the moving cinema
of her daughter’s dramatic face
The Mother will not whittle her offspring weeping
She will not whittle for her a single tear
She settles for whittling inside her child-friend, heart-fruit,
a heart so open that it can only be an un-forbidden door
for the universe to enter
and recline in the pulp of its chambers
until the call to carnival and revel
places upon the universes’ illusions about itself
every hanging, menacing and magnificent mask –
with which all shadows in this heart space must genuflect.
The mother declares her daughter’s heart to be a cathedral
And though the mother is without her body,
she is resurrected in the carnival dance of her daughter
she congregates within her brown daughter
calling on her to demand of the world
that her majesty be seen and heard.
It is all her mother can do without a body
because she is now free to travel other gardens of Goddesses and Gods
with a gilded posse
of revelers, brown birds, butterflies, immigrants
and dimming memories
of being once hopeful and human
her belly bulging, burgeoning and blossoming her brilliant brown baby
born with every right to be regal.

Gangsta Lean - Tip that 40 or that Unsweetened Iced Tea to Someone's Memory

I keep hearing the song 'Gangsta Lean' by DRS in my head. It reminds me of heat, innocence, violence and hustlers at my school in Louisiana in the early 90's. It reminds me of this year of great loss, and trying to fill an unimaginable void. It reminds me of the stigmatized borough (the Bronx) I grew up in and people who are incarcerated, ill, or have passed away. As a nurse, My Mother used to tend to many of these people, most of them young and poor. She made them laugh through their suffering and subsequent deaths. She heard the stories of their lives and witnessed their premature deaths and this broke her heart. She worried about her own children getting 'caught up.' Growing up in the Bronx in the 1980's and seeing so many young people die, one of my Mother's major fears for my brother and I was that we would become drug addicts or get infected with AIDS. At the end of her life, she had many nightmares of this. Particularly of us becoming drug addicts. I hope that she gained some peace about this before she left this world and came to realize that the only thing my brother and I were addicted to was her love.

Hug your homey even if they're caught up in something you do not have any control over. Cuz your homey is human, too.

Ave Gloria

THIS BLOG IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR SWEET MOTHER,

IGENA GLORIA MILLER

St. John's, Antigua, October 24, 1933 - Bronx, NY, March 30, 2008

BASSA BASSA

is something my Mother used to say.
I do not know what it really means.
I only know what it means to me.
The first artist I met was my Mother.
I am one of the masterpieces she left behind.
And although I intend to wreak creative havoc
To both fill and understand the void in me that she left
I hope she will continue to rest in peace.

Dear Reader, Welcome to BASSA BASSA ARTS!
I am trying to find my voice again after a long period of grief. Over the past two years I have watched my mother suffer a great deal, then die. Since my Mother’s passing, I have been trying to redefine what it is I have come to the world to say.
My Mother was an immensely private person and raised me to be that way, so I hesitate to even write about this, but as an artist trying to create from a place of integrity, I feel that it is important and healing for me to be open about my grief. My Mother's life and death will forever inform my self-expression. Her story like so many of our stories is the complicated story of the immigrant, black woman, health care worker, mother, wife, daughter, auntie, human being. I am so sad that those of you who read this will never get a chance to meet her because she was so bawdy, enigmatic, controversial and hilarious. I used to say this to her when she was being funny: 'Mommy you really need to take that show on the road' and I guess 7 months after her death - on today, her 75th birthday, when it hits me real hard that she is gone and not coming back- I can say that she did.
Here is the Tribute I wrote for her and read at her funeral. The title comes from a letter I found among her belongings after she passed. It was addressed to her mother, Wilhemina, dated sometime in the late 70's, informing her that she was returning home to Antigua, with my brother, father and I, to see her and jump up at Carnival. My mother opened the letter with, "To My Dear Sweet Mother, Wilhemina." Here is how I open mine:
To My Dear Sweet Mother, Igena
To My Dear Sweet Mother, Igena
As you continue the dream of your life in the richness of death
I hear you telling jokes throughout the heavens,
safe like a babe in the arms of Jesus,
comforted by departed loved ones and angels
Who watch you illuminate the paradise you have longed for
with the energy from your smile.

I hear you singing Calypso and beating the steel pan with your brother Eugene,
I see you running and jumping into the forever of your father, Arthur’s arms
Who tells you that he, really, had never ever let you go.
I smell you cooking saltfish with your Mother, Wilhemina and Sister, Dorothy
And when I close my eyes I could just see you
embracing, forever, your Uncle, Job
For like him, you have kept your faith and are therefore more than well again,
You are what you were the entire length of your life
“Gene the Queen,” my elegant, sassy, bawdy, sensitive, passionate mother
A woman with more levels than the Taj Majal,
The open sea, with all of its purple depths.

To my Dear Sweet Mother, Igena,
You are now the ancestor we dream of
When we want to remember how to put the real ‘glam’ back into ‘glamour,’
Then add charm and sophistication to appear larger than life.
But you were always more than just an image to me.
You told me, as a child, that no matter what I wanted to do with my life you would
Always love me, and you did.
And with the ardent spirit of the immigrant, you embraced the true meaning of ‘America’ when you told me that I had the power to be anything I wanted to be in the world,
And with these words, said with such heart-rending love,
you unfettered a little black girl’s imagination.

To My Dear Sweet Mother, Igena
You are not gone from me, Mommy,
You are in everything I have, say, will or won’t do
You have simply nestled like a butterfly with its purple, blue and red celestial body
throughout every one of my cells,
to rest now, rest, rest, rest, finally in peace
Recline, forever on the warm, full mattress of your daughter’s heart
Knowing that it is more than an honor to me, to have sprung
from the calm, turbulent, magnetic, majestic, insides of you.
Love, Tiffany

Ashe, Ashe

Life and death should always include some kind of celebration, even though both my Mother did not live long enough to see the first black President.

Happy Birthday, Mommy!