Into the Trees

Hi! I went looking online for inspiration and found some fabulous images and videos of forest installations. Here are a few things to nibble on as you're dreaming your piece(s)...



(Below) Sam White and Ayisa Wadud's installation "Forest for the Trees" at the American Steel Warehouse, Oakland
Link: http://oaklandnorth.net/2010/01/23/the-old-american-steel-warehouse-becomes-a-showcase-for-art/



(Below) "Dream Forest" installation by Alan LeQuire, Customs House Museum, Clarksville, Tennessee
Link: http://www.alanlequire.com/dreamforest.shtml




(Below) "Nature Factory" installation by Suppose Design Office, Aoyama, Japan
Link: http://lisastown.com/inspirationwall/2009/10/21/nature-factory

and also this

I was hungry for dance last night, apparently. While hunting around (what's up with all these hunger / hunting metaphors?) on youtube for the trailer for The Rain, by Pontus Lidberg (Headlands resident artist in 2008) I came across this one, which I like even better...

louise

I first encountered Louise Lecavalier in the mid-90s, when dance for video was becoming its own genre (vs. recorded live performances) and I was hungrily scrounging around for as much info I could find about choreographers working on the N. American - European circuit. I remember the first time I saw a video of La La La Human Steps: her strength, her fearlessness .. in some ways she seems more like an icon made flesh than a regular human. I never saw her/them live, alas, but she has always held a place among the collection of amazing dance moments that lives in my brain.

More at: http://www.louiselecavalier.com/index_en.html

From Wikipedia:
Louise Lecavalier (born 1958) is a Canadian dancer, known as one of the icons of Canadian contemporary dance. Lecavalier was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She began her professional dance career at the age of eighteen when she joined Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire. It was there that she met Édouard Lock. Lecavalier became Lock's muse in his company La La La Human Steps. With her mane of platinum dreadlocks, her physical power and her mastery of the full-body barrel jump, which looks like a horizontal pirouette, her image was a signature for the company. She was the perfect embodiment of Lock's frenetic and technically punishing androgynous aesthetic in works such as Human Sex (1985) and Infante, c'est destroy (1991).

when you feel the hit

My friend Kasey, a diehard fan of So You Think You Can Dance, visited last week, and we spent one Saturday evening watching clips from the show on our big projector wall. I must give kudos: some of the dancers are really phenomenal, and some of the choreography reaches that level where the kinetic and kinesthetic impact is so powerful, you feel like the movement is happening to YOU.

For example: (I recommend watching the video directly from youtube in order to see the full screen)


I once saw a dance performance by a choreographer named Robin Stiehm that was about abusive relationships. The piece built up slowly, until a moment about 2/3 of the way through where the male performer lands a solid blow into the stomach of the female performer, who falls and slumps.

It wasn't overdone. It hurt for days.

something in the way she moves

In our new space we have a very big white wall. When we came to see the place for the first time, I think the idea of having a projector showed up almost instantaneously when we walked up the stairs to the second floor living area and saw the immense vaulted ceilings.

We moved in. I started researching on craigslist, learning about brands, bulbs, weight, audible noise, and that for whatever reason the AE700U has a sharper picture than the AE900U, even though the latter is a more recent model.

One Saturday morning I woke up and was lolling around when it occurred to me to look on Ebay. Ach! an AE700U--for $200 less than I had seen it on craigslist. Free shipping! When does the auction end...? in 30 minutes. Shit! OK. OK. OK. drink tea. Calm down. Check bids: only one bid. OK. drink tea. Check newspaper headlines. Check bids. 9 minutes to go. then 5, then 2, then 45 seconds. I hit "enter" on my bid. Zam! Zamzam! Two other bidders come out of nowhere, just like me. But I won!

Wait for package... ... ... ... (!) ... ...

It arrives. All parts are present but the cord that goes from the computer to the projector: trip to Berkeley used computer store. And then:

Night. Projector fired. And this:



We watched it three times in silence. Our neighbor across the courtyard watched through his kitchen window into our kitchen window.

We showed it again at our second gathering on Sunday--the first video to inaugurate our Yumme drive in movie theater. After it played all the way through, the words showed up: "That happens every night."

That happens every night.

I keep thinking:


that

happens

E V E R Y

night

Two years into the program, and finally one day...

At some point within the past two years the lightbulb went on about how artmaking is both an inner and an outer process: by working with materials, shape, color, form, words, movement, etc. on the outside we are also effecting transformation (thoughts, energy, ideas, symbolic representation, relationship to form, metaphorical associations, beliefs) on the inside. In making art I am remaking myself in some way.

What I hadn't really understood until two weeks ago is the piece about letting the materials guide the artmaking process. Wow. It's a very interesting moment when you finally start seeing what you haven't been seeing.

At the end of our Become Yourself housewarming party, a small group of us rounded out the night down in the studio making collages. I'm a fan of collage -- especially those that tap into a layer of visceral "knowing" (the best phrase I can come up with to describe our deep capacity to feel the relationships between symbols even if we can't describe them in language). I haven't done much collage, tho, most likely because up until this portal evening I've always approached them on a literal level: I want to make this, so I need pictures of this and this and this... But lo, on that night, after the singing, the champagne, the candlelight, the brilliance of spontaneous performances that gave birth to Inside the Artists Studio on our wee stage, something else was in motion so I just let the images do their thing. A beautiful b&w photo of a man playing a violin wanted to be carefully cut out, so I started there. Then there was the piece of blue paper with the little white dots that looked like stars that I had found on the street in Minneapolis - it wanted to be part of the picture too. And the photo of the dresses hanging on the line from Marin magazine. And the castle. I just set to cutting them out and waited and witnessed their self organization process. The violin man became the man in the sky playing music to move the world, creating just enough order so that the castle could have a manicured garden, and allowing sufficient freedom so that the dresses on the clothesline could blow in the wind and the flowers grow across the page.


A few days later there was another collage.


And then a few days after that I experienced my first consciously transformative dance rehearsal (let the movement make the dance).

To be continued...

I saw Inception and I said

Holy moly that's an amazing movie! The intricacy and precision, the complexity and detail, and yet also a compelling storyline about human frailty. I'm still in the wooing of it and can't quite see the snags yet (there always are some, aren't there?) but dang - that's the kind of oeuvre I aspire to... Does this not say it all? "Inception is a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind." (from the Warner Bros. website)

I'm fascinated by inner and outer architecture -- the spaces that we inhabit and how we experience them. I think there are a lot of parallels to be explored between the places spaces we (as individuals, as communities) are drawn to and the organization and contours of our inner minds.

Here's a trailer: