Peteskibreen's Blog

Art Love Spirit Oneness

A L S O

Opening talk given by Peter Breen at Sarge Jhorgenson’s Exhibition “Stay Awhile” at Vacant Assembly [ Brisbane] on Friday April 12, 2024

Welcome everyone to this exhibition, installation and exposure to the paintings, poetry and prose of Sarge Jhorgenson in this wonderful space, Vacant Assembly.

I would like to acknowledge the country we are on tonight – that of the Juggera and Turbal people and to pay my respects to them and to their elders, past, present and emerging.

I love clouds.

I love their shape, sensuality, texture, tonality and that they are always appearing, reappearing and disappearing.

Their poetic presence in the spaces between.

Have you ever had one of those light bulb moments, or an epiphany where all of a sudden you are newly aware of some fact or metaphor or joy? I did recently and it was if the clouds in their never ending stories of change and presentations of beauty were inviting me to make art, make marks just as clouds do. Endlessly. Not to market – make sure you buy some of this work here tonight though! – but to be. Because art, as clouds, needs no justification. We are as humans here to make marks. We are mark making animals of deeply spiritual and story telling capacities and giftedness.

Sarge jumped on a storm-cloud chariot years ago with S&M then Love Love Studios – a significant ARI in Brisbane. Here tonight we are immersed in some of his works, his personal works as an artist, poet and writer.

It’s worth reading a poem and buying the book from his aptly titled “Morning Drive Poems” written on the dashboard at the red traffic lights on the way to teach [ My copy is with my neice so I will edit this and insert a few when the book is returned.]

There was a sharing of presence and passion in the last 20 years when Jugglers came to Brunswick Street and Sarge would visit with others – but on his own it seemed – then disappear like a cloud. I discovered that one of the Jugglers artists – Bohdi Gardner – knew Sarge very well as his English teacher at Caboolture High School.

English teacher, husband, father, artist, poet, writer, skate board rider – a polymath indeed!

It’s a great pleasure for me to be here tonight with Sarge, at his invitation, to launch his show. And I ask you, with him to STAY AWHILE for one of the urgencies in a world that is wiping out its brain-cells on screen-time addiction if for us to resolve to STAY AWHILE in galleries and studios, in forests and mark making and to become patient, attentive observers.

In closing I would like to read a poem by Mary Oliver “When I am among trees”

When I am among trees

When I am among the trees

Especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out,

“Stay awhile”

The light flows from their branches

And they call again,

“It’s simple” they say,

“and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light,

and to shine.” [Sarge]