Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Notes.... Exciting Art in Providence


This week marks the closing of two inspiring shows: "Knot", a three-part solo exhibition by artist Annabel Daou at The David Winton Bell Gallery (more from me to come on this show!), and
"How to Hold On" constructed works by Jon Laustsen, at 5 Traverse. (5T is holding a closing party this Friday, March 13th, from 7-9 with DJ Timothy O'Keefe).

But not all is lost! Call me biased, but I am particularly psyched for the upcoming show in the Jewelry District, at 150 Chestnut Street. (Full disclosure: I will have work in this show)
One of the more unique things about this show is that it features *tons* of site-specific installations, many of which are interactive.

Learn more here: http://deconstruct2.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Riff on "The Seas Define Our Graves"

(quote: Erik Wohlgemuth)

by Natasha Maria Brooks-Sperduti


Water flows in constant motion. Energy waves course through me in waves of e-motion defining my environment, transforming me, lifting me tossing me, dragging me and placing me back down when they are through. I fear how constant they are. I fear their motion. I have no way to stop them, but I try, seeking stillness for solace. I have this idea that bodies are still and solid and that these qualities add up to “strong”. It is an antiquated idea. Never really true but in few cases, and always with a quieter rule of Flow balancing, governing, that 'truth'. But I know that I am made up more of water, motion, energy, salt and silt than hard or still or unchanging Anything. Maybe my ideas are like sediment. A slow cementing clogging up the experience of Now with notions of stillness.

-- -- --

Outside Marseilles I hiked the Mediterranean cliffs they call Cornishes. I looked out through the wind, my eyes spilling down the steep dry rock to the sea below. There was a narrow inlet where boats huddled against the coast, rocking gently, protected from wild motion of wind and water by the body of the earth. In that moment the boats were people or pups in a litter – huddled for warmth, for comfort and safety. Sea farer or not, humans are land-bound.

-- -- --

I spend a lot of time thinking about our strange in-betweenness. Our commonality, on one hand, with earth, mud, and stone. That we have bodies with boundaries; bone, muscle and skin. That we experience the world, in part, as Objects In Space. And I spend at least as much time thinking about what is also true: How much of our physical being is water. What water's properties are. How real our perceptions and projections and psychology are. That we have energetic realms that exceed our bodies, and they are the palpable power of emotion and consciousness, which travel in wave forms. How our experience, how WE are constantly changing. At times I feel more like light. Like I manifest at least as much as a wave as I do a particle. I exist (as do you) way outside the body as well as deep within it. I am both place and place-less-ness. I stand alone, And we are all one...

-- -- --

The Seas Define Our Graves.

How?

The Seas. They limit our boundaries of earth, where we live and die, the boundaries of our safe space, and do they perhaps also define what is to us unknowable, and therefore occupy the realm of our fear? If not unknowable than simply that with which we have not yet learned to identify: the fluid, and the invisible.

'The Seas' define what we are not or what we fear to admit, what we refuse to acknowledge, what we struggle against. Chaos, disorder, our utter lack of control.

Because they are deadly to us, creatures of the earth.

In that seas of emotions threaten life as we know it, provoking change, they threaten our beloved predictability, or perception of reality. Seas, emotions, wave-forms, and The Changing threaten the foundations on which we have built our ego, our story. Their existence threatens to obliterate such things.

If Sea brings death and Earth life then how do we account for the healing quality of water, or for our own 85% of our shared make up?

The Seas Define Our Graves.

Define is a nice word. To define is to limit, to mold or shape. Water defines the earth through erosion. Earth limits water with its banks and shores, its tightly-packed slow moving mass. But in the span of time, water slowly wins. We are defined by what we are not. And as we live out our years we learn more and more about What We Are Not. This is as much a relief as a heartache. I am freed to be what I am as I shrink into that shape by seeing the full large space of not-ness around me. And yet. This is a particulate notion. [there are others, as I've said, as i feel, as i hope to push the world to acknowledge.] It can be painful. The process of definition. There are always wounds, mistakes, struggles. 'De'. Is that a negative prefix? Fine. A smaller grit. More polished, more specific.

Erosion. I think of wind and water carving out canyons. Exposing layers of time. Earth and bodies becoming living histories of themselves. I think of rushing water grooving deep riverbeds down through our country. Refining and defining and re finding their path. Sometimes hopping the edge to forge new paths. Flooding planes and Having Their Way, reserving the right to re-route. I think of man pushing back with dams and bridges and reservoirs... River rocks get refined *really fine* till their surface is as smooth and reflective as the water which defined it. And I think finally of sand, the continuation of this process of constant motion. A toss-until-lost approach. Banging makes it softer, sort-of.

I think The Seas Define Our Graves is poignant because of the emotional connection between the sea and fear. Motion, that ultimate uncontrollable element, that element that comes with birth into this world of space. That which is unpredictable yet constant, and which rattles me, from inside out and outside in. Motion. CHANGE. We want it. We have it. We fear it. We fight it because we have no choice about it. And because in our desperate attempt to believe in our own power over nature we normalize The Constant. We act, in our minds, with our notions like Normal = Stillness, sameness. This is a creature comfort, a creature desire. We mistake stillness and sameness unchangingness for safety, and so we seek it, trusting only ourselves to initiate action. Feeling dominated and oppressed by other forces of power, other initiators of change. We seek what we know. What has come before. What is unchanging. But change is our only true constant. And being the flow we feel is a possibility, a choice, is not weak, but powerful. This sea of/we fear is not the enemy. In fact, it is our fear of change, our deep desire for consistency which buries us, limits us, causes our death.

Our Graves. In our graves is what we bury. What defines our graves is what buries us. The earth, the notion of stillness, the attachment to solidity, the perception of stillness and solidity, themselves an illusion or at best a temporality. We bury what we wish away - The dormant the subconscious the invisible the deniable the tugging but silent. The horror. The truth. Occasionally, we bury what we struggle to accept, once we have laid it down to rest, let go. We bury then as a way of putting it back. Into the pool. Into circulation. Out of this realm and into the next. With human death, we are given little choice. This is what is done. Graves are the last concrete, latitudinal longitudinal Earth-bound places of loss. They locate our grief on the body of this Earth. But we know that emotion such as this cannot be limited to place or in time. Emotion such as this is like we are, and bigger than we are.

The truth of death calls for a re-defining of the Self as wave form. Of the self as reflective of that oft-denied half of truth: The truth as changing, as existing in and outside of time, as being shapeless, formless, transparent and shifting...

The seas define our graves. They do. In that our fear of fluidity limits our conscious experience of existence. Our motion-related anxiety limits our evolution, limits our ability to see Truth.

Acknowledgment of FLUIDITY - it's power, it's beauty, it's essence, it's all-pervasive presence around and inside of us. Embracing it, learning to be it, championing it's wisdom, harnessing it's power, normalizing it. That is the next way that Truth will set us free.