Keriosity

If you’ve read enough of my essays, you know that I am a ridiculously clumsy person both in action and in speech. But in case you’re new, you can catch up by reading my posts about this email blunder, this hour of dumbassery, the time I got molested by a giant ice-cream cone (which sounds much more graphic than it was), my always-fun “paranoia mode”, and how I guaranteed my place in hell, sent my air-conditioner on a 5-story free-fall, and sustained a head injury that required physical therapy for my eyeballs. And those are only the ones I’ve written about.

But for now, I will tell you this short story of stupidity:

Last Friday, Emil and I were taking a post-dinner stroll down a little shopping street in our town.

We came upon an outdoor art show featuring the work of Sophia Gasparian, an artist neither of us had heard of. Her art was sort of cartoonish, some featuring children and animals, sort of a dark tone overall. We were reminded of another artist we like - Yoshitomo Nara. Here are two of Nara’s pieces:

Weird, sarcastic, dark humor appeals to us. So, when we saw the below piece at Sophia’s show, we felt it was of the same vein:

It also appealed to our OCD. (Instead of the normal ghost activities like shuffling around, banging on walls, and moaning, my ghost is going to vacuum and rearrange the dishes in people’s dishwashers. This painting spoke to me.)

And we had wine earlier. And I love Edward Gorey. And I’m an idiot. So…

We met the curators and asked how we could purchase it. Emil said “It’s such a great piece!” and I said “Yeah, it’s totally our sense of humor.” They seemed confused, but they gave us the artist’s card.

When we got home, I went to her website and learned that Sophia Gasparian’s work is inspired by her childhood experiences growing up in Armenia. This particular piece is part of a collection of works depicting the Armenian Genocide of 1915. It’s a painting of an orphan who obviously knows her death is near and that she has no family left to care for her grave.

I wanted to vomit.

I am beyond embarrassed. I sent an apology email to the curators, attaching the Yashitomo Nara work to explain my spectacular ignorance.

I’d like to say this is the first time I have made an accidental yet terribly offensive remark involving someone’s cultural history. But no, I’ve done it once before.

Emil and I were at Disney World, in the Little Mermaid/Under the Sea exhibit, and there was a very clever demonstration of bioluminescence in sea creatures. We walked through a little cave and a light flashed, leaving our shadows on a glow-in-the-dark wall.   I blurted out…”Oh like Hiroshima”* and Emil shot me an angry look - we were at the Disney World in Tokyo.

I’m just going to stop talking in public.

*I’d like to clarify that I was not trying to make light of the tragedy at Hiroshima, I was in science mode, and while the Hiroshima shadows have nothing to do with bioluminescence, they are both effects of radiation absorption.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Stuff I did. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.