Refractions

First published on Huffington Post, Aug 14, 2016 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bds-as-american-as-apple-_b_7988876.html For the last two years, while writing Liberty Landing , my social novel about the American experience that was inspired by John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. , I have been steeped in the history of America’s founding and the American Revolution. As a third culture immigrant with an early formative education emphasizing British, Asian, and world history, with a lesser focus on American history, considering the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution through a polycultural lens has been an endeavor in refraction. My illations and realizations are oblique — propagated waves changing direction because of the very nature of the transmission. In studying the canon of American history and historiography, surveying source documents and museum artifact collections, and divining like the runes the work of brilliant historians and chroniclers of history, I learne...

First published in Huffington Post Jul 1, 2016 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/evidence-of-things-seen-the-art-of-nancy-lu-rosenheim_b_7683040.html Chicago artist, Nancy Lu Rosenheim, was in Cambodia, drifting in and out of the inevitable vortex of travel and timelessness, enervated by Equatorial heat, and frequently ruminating on a site-specific exhibition about swallows that she was planning for the Hyde Park Art Center , when she set eyes on the Ta Prohm temple at Angkor Wat. “I was overwhelmed by the way nature both adhered to and inhabited the architecture,” Rosenheim said, of the eerily stunning ruins built by an ancient king, abandoned in the 15th century, rediscovered in the 20th, and made famous in Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider. “The seeds of the trees had planted themselves inside and outside the walls and stones of the monastery walls, and had become woven into the architecture. They were inextricably linked and any attempt to detach them would have mea...