Tuesday, September 14, 2010

currently untitled





here is a sculpture i made in june and july. it's the first actualized piece in a series i first started envisioning in 2004. i had been working with white vertical lines which bulged in places. there was a sense of hanging and stasis. some lines seemed like collapsable hollow tubes through which a bulging something might descent. the suspended stillness and the slow descending of the unnameable disguised form had my full attention. Not long after making the pieces with lines and what I later came to call "fertile dormant sacs", I began to imagine more shapely forms with inner spaces. Most were columns of some sort. Still white. For the first year of seeing them, the columns were either completely suspended, like this one, or touched only the ceiling or the floor. At first they were too narrow to get inside. then they grew. When they connected to the ceiling or floor, they were pesky and in my way- coming down from the ceiling so that you might bump your head on them, or up from the floor enough to trip and fall over. There was always a forest of them. It was so long before I saw a single column alone, and by the time I envisioned a column that connected the ceiling and the floor, I was so used to seeing incomplete forms that I was shocked. when i first saw this one, it was brown inside and i could get inside it. i felt utterly peaceful and at ease when i was.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

The Wheel of Fortunes at Foo Fest 2010



14 artists and 48 original works of art (we omitted duplicates for this grid).

If we judged by how these works intrigued, excited, inspired, offended, perplexed and/or touched Foo Festival goers, then the night was an unqualified success. They came in droves—there was a line around our booth all night—and waited eagerly as Sam, playing carny huckster, lured them in and held them at bay, watching on as I, the "medium" in flowing white, interpreted the works of art as fortunes in a quiet corner of the tent. They cheered as the wheel spun, and had a whole host of reactions to their readings. Some nodded solemnly as they heard their fate, others cried, shared stores and dreams (both kinds), or laughed with joy. I was astonished by the intimacy of the experience—many hugged me goodbye as though we were not strangers.


Many of the pieces are still available for sale (all are under $33). Email me at natashamaria0@gmail.com if you're interested.


We hope to do this again!


Sam documented all of the works. You can see them close up (along with a couple of shots of the booth) here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwwwheel-of-fortune/sets/72157624608558399/


(Keep checking flickr this week, as I will be adding comments under individual pieces, sharing some of my interpretations and the more memorable reactions and experiences resulting from this project.)

Thursday, August 5, 2010

DUET Our first fortune for the wheel!



When folded closed, this pair of pollinators serves a double purpose. What is there to learn about ourselves and our fortune from our beautiful monarch brethren? Designed and created for this project by Jenny Lee Fowler, of Port Ewan, NY.

To make a wedge yourself, read to call for art on this blog.
See more by Jenny here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennyleefowler/sets/72157621138090326/

Monday, July 19, 2010

Pollinators

Just quickly...

I was weeding milkweed out of my garden one day (it's as persistent as mint or raspberries) when I learned that monarch butterflies would be extinct without it. This is just one of nature's many ways of balking our ideas about independence. Psychologically, independent = healthy, budget-wise, independent = healthy. But in the natural world (of which we ARE a part, no matter our resistance to the idea), independent is simply IMPOSSIBLE. Like silence, it's an abstract concept, rather than an actual reality. After a road trip with some botanists where we did quite a bit of roadside plant identification, I was eager to put these two lessons together. I am more than ever interested in the invisible relationships between animals and plants. When I was a kid my mom had two friends in a relationship. Their names were lois and jan. We said Loisandjan so quickly. They were always together when we saw them. It got to the point where I really identified them as two parts of a whole. When Lois and Jan broke up I just couldn't get used to saying "Jan" or "Lois". It was as though some part of the word and the unit were missing. I want to start seeing plants this way. To see trumpet vine and think humming bird. To see sunflowers and think bees or golden finches. I've started doing research into pollinators. Here are some images I've collected while looking around on the internet. They are on an ImageSpark Page, which is a cool way to collect images online.

http://www.imgspark.com/profile/view/natashamaria/

Call for Art

I've just built a wheel for this year's FOO FEST. This here wheel is A WHEEL of FORTUNES. That's right folks, this is your future we're talking about. And the future of every spin-inclined Foo-goer on the fateful night of August 14th.

(Here is a picture as it stands now. The arrow, the spinning mechanism, and of course the fortunes are still to come.) The wheel has 9 wedge-shaped spots for YOUR art. (That's 9 at any given time. We will be selling the pieces, so we need tons of them).

The thought is to cull from the ideas, images and language of divination in its many guises. All sorts of mysticism, science and pseudo-science may be used for inspiration. Tarot, palm reading, numerology, I-Ching, dreams, myths, science-fiction, astrology, Rorschach, you name it.

Starting at 7pm, Foo Fest audience can spin the wheel for a low low price. Their fortune is told based on the wedge of art the wheel stops on. They also get the opportunity to buy that particular work of art, if they so choose. Each artist sets the cost of their work ($30 and under, please), and keeps all but $2 of the sale cost. Participants may spin the wheel multiple times to try to land on a work they like, but their fortune will only be told once.

Details for Artists:

The size and shape of the piece is specific. You can pick up a template at AS220 main gallery, AS220 project space, Firehouse 13, RISD Office of Student Life, the Coffee Exchange, and various other spots around town. The wedges will fit on a 11 x 14 sheet of paper, but you can use any flat surface as a base. It is ok to build up (they can have some dimension to them), but please keep them under 1.5 inches thick/tall.

Due by Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
To 54 Trenton Street, Apt #1, Providence, RI 02906.


Be sure to include the following:
1. NAME of the piece, (please name it that will help in the telling of the fortune)
2. PRICE of the piece, (all work must be for sale)
3. Your name, email & phone number.

If you have ANY QUESTIONS, email me: natashamaria0@gmail.com (that's a zero at the end)

---

Here is a little more about the artists, and the project:

Natasha Brooks-Sperduti & Sam Holland
Natasha Brooks-Sperduti uses the motion of her body to make site-specific sculpture and installation. Her actions trace a boundary between our tangible world and another, less visible reality. Continuing her investigation of gesture, the spiral, and the invisible divine, she and collaborator Sam Holland present A Wheel of Fortunes. They invite Foo-goers to enter into their oracular lair, open up to possibility, take their chances and spin the wheel. Each spot on the wheel is an original work of art, created by one of dozens of artists just for you, dear spinners. And like a tarot, it foretells your future. Worry not! They will help you interpret, just remember, they are only the messengers!

Natasha and Sam are Providence residents and RI natives. Sam earns a living [via interactive design]. Natasha produces community events in Providence and New York, and teaches yoga. She has shown her art locally, in New York and London, and holds a Bachelors' Degree in Studio Art from Bard College.

preservation

I currently work at a historical library. It is frigid there year round because the collections, apparently, decompose slower in the cold. It is an environment dictated not by the needs of the people in it, but rather by the "preferences" of the precious objects we "value" enough to preserve. I am fond of exclaiming "I'd rather be dead than preserved.


To continue the thread of thinking about time and space and human efforts towards confusing them, linking them artificially or otherwise insisting on a linear relationship for the two, I offer these two bits of beautiful found writing, both of which crossed by desk today. The first offers a beautifully abstract definition of history, and knowing. It re-mixes temporality and memory into the fold...


The second also argues with its perceived imposed linearity in the act of preservation and history-making.


1.

In a recent review in Powells, Mark Gustafson tells us about a book called Nox, A Box of Greiving, by Ann Carson. The book is a

so-called "poem" (a Greek-derived word meaning "a thing made"). A unique assemblage of bits of conversation, letters, postmarked stamps, memories, cut-up photographs, drawings, paint, staples, etc., Nox is here replicated as one long accordion foldout in a clamshell box.”


Carson connects what she is doing to the Greek word historia, "asking about things," and to Herodotos, the first historian. She says: "Now by far the strangest things that humans do -- he is firm on this -- is history. This asking. For often it produces no clear or helpful account . . . Historian can be a storydog that roams around . . . collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide." She adds: "To put this another way, there is something that facts lack."


(more:) I came to think of translating as a room . . . where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. . . . Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.


2. the art-agenda elist published my herforeto favorite press release ever, reprinted here:

Extempore Temporary Contemporary Art Museum Amsterdam opens

Since the Fall, October '08, an uncomfortable gap exists in Amsterdam, missing a, or actually, theContemporary Art Museum. In these one and a half years passed, nothing has been done in its absence. Nothing real has been made. Nothing to address this problem. What lies waiting is only an ever more critical responsibility. Until the Stedelijk returns.

We jump into the abyss between the now and future. Not no longer, not not yet—

now now now now you missed it
there's a new now now now now now.


If not us, who? With nobody left to make the selection, we've selected ourselves. We do it because we can—subjectivity as our only strategy.

You can disagree.

ETCAMA.
Problems for a problem.
Contemporary for the Contemporary.
Art for Art.
Museum for Museums.

History exists. The Contemporary exists. Museums are Contemporary Art history making machines.

Our Museum is a Contemporary Art making machine. The only history it writes is its own.

Museums collect linearity. Show linearly. Important artists, important movements, placed on a great timeline in the name of a complete, objective education. Our Museum does not confuse time and space.

Museums suffocate, cryogenically freeze works, techniques and ideologies, they preserve a type of value.
They are non-profit, profit making, with democratic illusions of balance, of objectivity. The structure of Museums, the language they use, their goals and premise are not wrong. We do it different.

A Museum is a failed Art project because a Museum can't fail as an Art project.
We are essentially dealing with an economy of means. We have limits, they are subjective.

This is the only way.

We will not, can not operate, in a typically Museum-like manner. We are concerned with presenting Art, the Contemporary and to give Amsterdam a Contemporary Art Museum project when there is none.

Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst / space in collaboration with What Is Happening Here


I am compelled to collect things and moments. Lately I have taken to obsessing over 72 hour time lapse photo projects as a way of capturing a moment in time. It is a curious instinct some of us have. To archive, to map, to record and catalogue, to trap or still or freeze something or some moment in time. In the past I have attributed it to fear, to attachment, to desire, to control. I have thought of it as creative, as damning, as violent, and also as kind. I am interested in the various motives and outcomes of this sort of action on living beings, on moments in time, and on objects. How these actions can change the nature or essence of a being, relationship, moment or thing.


This whole post makes me want to re-read the author's note from My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig, and follow his bushwacked rainforest path to Walter Benjamin's writings on Collecting...


For stilling, de or re contextualizing, and framing is the problem of anthropologists, philosophers, curators, historians and artists alike. Those that try and make sense of things, order of things, meaning of things, must study and define the edges of that thing. They must seek it's isolation even when it is inherently connected. Is this true?


If motion, or change, is our only constant, what does it mean to freeze something? What does the action serve or accomplish? If the goal is to honor something, or to study it (I respect study most when honoring is the initial action of the inquiry. Understanding may be impossible without honor first) how can we accomplish that goal as we allow the subject in question to live, breathe and change? If sight were our only sensation, then video might be an answer... But we have bodies, we are, in fact, part object ourselves...


Related posts on this blog:

http://natashamaria.blogspot.com/2008/07/mapping-thoughts-and-radical-re.html

http://natashamaria.blogspot.com/2009/03/riff-on-seas-define-our-graves.html