Thursday, October 28, 2010

Natural Rhythm & the Wood Surface Studies

There is a beautiful poem by Jack Gilbert called "Alone." It has got to be one of the most moving pieces of writing I've ever come across. I guess it's ok if I post it here:
Alone
Jack Gilbert
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
The poem is wonderful for many reasons but the sentence that always (and I've read it so many times) catches me off-guard, almost physically moves me, is "She cares nothing about the mystery." All of life, all of existence is expressed in that one sentence, deepened especially by the context in which it appears. 
There is an awareness of "the mystery," the fact of its presence is understood yet Gilbert doesn't try to shine his flashlight right at it, he is wise enough to know that he should better just leave it alone and instead focus on the tangible things, the grass, the dog's ears and eyes, the moment, the gentleness, the love. 

The other night, I was tired yet lucid (don't you, too, love that), and as I took some notes, wrote down some unconnected lines which seemed somehow relevant, I started reducing my hand writing to pure form. Content became unimportant, and it was interesting to simply watch the way the lines became longer, more sweeping, almost melodic.
I decided to go to a new page and fill it up with this new type of void writing - from top to bottom, and then new lines on top of old ones. 






There are now patterns on the page that have nothing and everything to do with writing. If we take them strictly for what they are, we'll see organic rhythms, landscapes - unlike anything else that exists in the world. We could make ten of these and spend a long time looking at all of them, comparing them, contrasting them, letting the visual material speak to us. There would never be two that are the same. They contain information on the materials used and the hand that executed them - how tired I was that night, how quickly I made them etc. 
I think that anything - anything natural, any matter, anything which contains atoms, anything that IS - will have its very own inherent melody that you can tap into. Could it be possible to, by being in an open, organic mood when assembling, make anything ring true according to its original "rightness?"

I can't see through these things, really. It just so happened that the thoughts I just articulated all of a sudden stood there, clearly and like an epiphany, during that lucid night. Maybe they have something to do with the wood surface studies I showed in the exhibition last week. I feel that they, too, have a natural rhythm to them, an original rightness. 
Of all the new experiments I've tried in the last months, the wood surfaces still continue to baffle me myself the most. I never get tired of looking at them. A rewarding experience, to be the artist yet to be able to look at the own work with somebody else's eyes.
Here are some detailed images I'd like to share.


Wood Surface Study #1


Wood Surface Study #3


Wood Surface Study #2


Study #3 - detail


Study #1 - detail





Study #3 - detail


I think I could say more, but I'm a slow writer, and maybe I should just let them speak for themselves.
Until soon.
P.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Things We Build - The Bowerbird piece

Sir David Attenborough reported on the fascinating Bowerbird several times, and two amazing videos can be found on youtube:




and:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zmfTr2d4c
(they won't let me embed the second one for some reason)

So many aspects of the bird's behavior are worth reflecting on. For me as an artist, the fact that here we have a bird who obviously has a well-developed sense of aesthetics, who arranges colors according to something like personal taste for a fellow bird to judge according to its personal taste, and for no other practical reason than to win over that other bird, is wonderful to be aware of.
Now, of course, the obvious discussion we could have here is whether this bird makes art or not (being an animal, God beware!), but that seems too obvious, so let's not have that discussion. It would just lead to a condescending animal vs. human conversation. There's no use in that. We are all fellow species, and we do what feels essential to us, as told by our instincts. We as humans simply have to deal with all the extra complications and confusions our super-brain confronts us with, but essentially we act out our nature. That's why I make art, anyways - out of instinctive reasons rather than calculated ones. Looking at the Bowerbird's care and love for his cause basically reassures me in my own endeavors.

Now, I've always had a strong passion for birds, been an avid birder for a big part of my life, and there are many ways I've tried to connect with them through my art. I've painted birds, I've used bird song in sound collages and videos, and last year I made a sculpture about the Shrike and its habit of storing prey on the thorns of plants and barbed wire. The idea of making an installation about the Bowerbird's garden had been on my mind for a while.

Let me switch over to something completely different for a while: The Berlin Wall - because it's the key to the other strong, defining interest of mine apart from nature: history, memory.
I was born in 1982. I was seven and lived in Berlin when the wall fell, which makes it one of my earliest memories. I consider the events of 1989 - 1990 to be among the most important, and most touching, in human history: The whole world order changed, a power system which had defined the last forty years, collapsed. And it all happened in my city, peacefully, as an effort and triumph of the human spirit in a way that I'm afraid I won't see again in my lifetime.
My family and I went into town a lot in the weeks after November 9th, 1989, to where the wall skeleton was on display like a dead whale, with countless "Mauerspechte" ("Wall-woodpeckers") hacking and chiseling away at it, while the east German soldiers were still patrolling the other side, for the lack of having received orders to do otherwise.
It was cold, drab and wet, with white, overcast skies. Berlin was pale and unsaturated, and in my memory it couldn't have been any more beautiful. You could see your breath and hear the wet pebbles crunch under your shoe. Here's how it was:



Recalling the old Berlin makes me about as nostalgic as I get. That's why I think Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" is the greatest film of them all:



Well, we collected numerous wall pieces during those months that are now seem so far away. Several bags stored away somewhere in a 2010 basement in Germany. One small bag containing seven pieces, however, has been here in Florida with me, and of course I wanted to use them in some way for an artwork.
I was aware of the countless traps I could've fallen into. It is extremely hard to make a piece of art about the Berlin Wall, because the topic is so loaded with historic weight and we internalized the imagery so much that it's very easy to become pathetic or too obvious (good rule of thumb: Never do the most obvious thing, avoid things that are too easy. Search for the extra layer you might have overlooked).

The solution took me a while to figure out, but then it came to me:
The male Bowerbird and his display would be the catalyzing feature to help me strip the wall pieces of their inherent, 20 year old pathos. He would use them, not caring about their story, and they would end up being one of many colorful elements in his garden. The bird and the people who built the wall would that way share their building material, and I could call the installation "Things We Build". The viewer's mind could go from there.
It would be the most unlikely and unexpected way to give new meaning to these pieces, planting them in an imaginary Australian rainforest, giving them into the trustworthy hands of a builder who knows better than to build a structure meant to violently divide.

This is how this latest installation came about.





P.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The Experimentations-show opened!

Hey friends,
my solo show "Experimentations: On Silence & Perception" had its opening on tuesday, and I can safely say that it was both a great success and a great relief. A lot of visitors showed up for an hour and a half of coffee, cookies and good conversations (the three essential c's of human existence - we had to go without the fourth one - carnies). Many of the FGCU art faculty and fellow art students gave me valuable feedback on my work, but what impressed me the most were some old friends I had lost track of over the years, and who now looked at the work - essentially learning about what it actually is that I'm about now - wide-eyed and impressed. Very good, connecting me back with them, kinda closing the gap.
Well, let me briefly talk about what the premise of the show was (something I haven't mentioned yet I believe), and I'll also share some photographs of when I documented it for myself when all the guests had left. Then, in later posts, I'll go into more detail about the conceptual context of some of the works.

The main title, "Experimentations", comes from Anica Sturdivant, our gallery director, who needed something to put on our website while I was out of reach over the summer. She picked the word with the intention of staying as vague as possible, by then obviously not knowing at all what I had in mind. Well, she was spot on in my opinion. After "In The Woods" I knew I needed to branch out, taking my work into several different experimental directions at the same time, in a playful, adventurous approach that would keep me on my toes every day in the studio. I'm not the kind of artist who does extensive series. I like to keep the work multi-layered, in a variety of media and forms, while at the same time offering cross-connections to every other territory within my creative landscape.
The show includes painting, installation, photography, video, sound and sculpture - a collection of detours and variations on the themes I'm interested in: silence and sound, manipulating our perception of reality, creating spaces that serve as sanctuaries. That is why I added the subtitle.
Here are some impressions from the show:






the Wood Surface Studies

the Bowerbird installation "Things We Build" 

the two "Memory: Berlin 1990" paintings and "Yellow Delta"

three abstract paintings

"Blue Glacier"

"Assorted New Worlds" - digital photography

detail from the New Worlds

another detail


ok, hopefully you enjoy these. I'll soon be back with more, especially on the wood surface studies and the Bowerbird piece. I will also upload the video work "Landscapes I Found" onto my Youtube page. Also coming up: the show as seen from the Bowerbird's point of view!

P.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

new show: On Silence & Perception

Next tuesday, the 12th, I will have a new solo show coming up at the ArtLab gallery on the FGCU campus. I'll share some more details about the nature of the works and the general themes of the show soon, but for now I figured I'd just put up the poster design I came up with, as well as some "alternate takes"... Enjoy.

The official one:



... and some alternative ones:






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