Mandy Greer's Mater Matrix Mother and Medium, Installation and Performance this Thursday

It's about to happen - Mandy's 200 foot long crocheted river and performance by choreographer and dancer Zoe Scofield comes to fruition this Thursday night at Camp Long in West Seattle.

The focus of this installation is part of a group of temporary public art projects in Seattle, "Water Calling ”. To quote Mandy from her site:

This new work is commissioned by Seattle Public Utilities 1% for Art Funds, and administered by Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, as a way to celebrate and interpret the splendor of Seattle’s urban creeks and encourage community involvement in the stewardship of our essential watersheds.

If I'm a brazen and unabashed champion of Mandy's project on this blog, it's with good reason.

People like me have come to know Mandy through her openness and invitation to join her in manifesting this project. She's offered public places as her studio, teaching young and old alike to crochet, discuss, connect, and learn. We've come to know her and her process a little better, but maybe we've also learned something about other artists or our own creativity. Most importantly, Mandy's project has built a community.

And through her work and Zoe's performance, we'll not only have a beautiful piece of art to enjoy but something to meditate on - sustainability, responsibility, and stewardship. The correlation is not lost - Mandy's work is about many things but it's also about caretaking and nurture. The flow of her project, the connection between the people involved, and a life-sustaining river flowing through woods connecting trees, ground, and sky is a beautiful metaphor.

Click on the links to read more about Water Calling and other artists involved in Seattle's summertime art installations. I'm excited about all of them, but keenly interested in John Grade's proposal for Volunteer Park, Mantle.

close up view of the river, Mandy Greer

image borrowed (taken by Jen Zwick) from her blog

Addendum to Mater Matrix Mother and Medium:

I neglected to add something really important to the last post's description of the event -- Mandy's installation and Zoe's performance will be accompanied by clarinet and megaphone music, created and performed by musician/composer Morgan Henderson!

From Mandy:

"The Performance, created by collaboration between myself, Zoe Scofield and Morgan Henderson is a hushed reflection on the subtle dynamics of the Forest embedded in the urban environment, at once organic as it is artificial. All three artists, in our own way, having responded to the quirky overgrown tranquility of Camp Long’s little pond, invite you to sit for a short time in quiet observation of the rhythms of this unusual site, heightening your focus through sound, movement, breath and site-responsive installation."

This really does just get better and better - make sure you don't miss it! This one night only performance by Zoe Scofield and Morgan Henderson will be this coming Thursday July 16th, 6:30 pm at Camp Long in West Seattle.

The Treachery of Blogging

Blogging is a practise. It's a rather meta one at that, too. Blogging is a practise which speaks for and references to the practise. It's a work in practise. It's a work about the work. (it needs practise)

It has rules: you shouldn't start writing before you've had coffee (broken, this minute) but writing when drunk is perfectly acceptable and often humorous (probably still shouldn't). You should post every day (broken daily) if not multiple times a day (um...). You should provoke conversation (batting about average). You should reference other blogs (done obsessively). You should go join in conversations on other blogs to see what other people are saying. You should be smart, thoughtful, witty, insightful, silly, serious, proactive, reactive, first, or last. You should monitor your use of semi-colons, parenthesis, and emoticons (:|). You should be yourself (check).

Artists can have particular conflict in blogging. There's so much to say I've hardly the time to say it and criticism is tricky. Also I should be in the studio more often than on the computer (I'm eyeballing my table piled with fuzzy yarn just to the right of my mouse right now) . That might be a fallacy, maybe the writing and research is part of the studio practise but I'll get to that in a minute. And the words are themselves an uphill battle fraught with either too elite a tone or not elite enough. I don't have an example for that last one. Yet. But it needs to be accessible and it needs to be lucid.

I'm not the best at keeping up but it's important that I write. It seems I must. My fingers itch if I don't start typing about something, and I must have about ten different articles started that I intend to post. I just can't seem to shut up about it -- I'm always thinking and talking even if no one's around. This seems to have happened to George Orwell - here's an excerpt from his essay Why I Write:

As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

I don't want to put you through it, but like Orwell, there's a continuous narrative running through my head at all times. By narrowing it down and writing about the world I occupy, the art I see, the people I meet, and the aspects of my studio practise which interest me, I'm strengthening my artistic muscles. I'm honing the focus, and getting to the truth. I'm sorting through a myriad of problems and solutions. Through these words, I'm threading everything I've ever seen and written about into the paper with the yarn along with the thoughts and daydreaming and history; and hopefully carving out an ever-larger piece of that damned pie.

Why do you write? What do you write about? How does it influence, fortify, expand, inspire, or otherwise nurture everything else you do (art, programming, teaching, fill in the blank)?

Ceci n'est pas une pie thanks again to Shaun K.
And this is supposedly animated. Click on it!

Mandy Greer, Joshua Lindenmayer, and Gretchen Bennett at Seattle Art Museum Family Day

This weekend Mandy Greer is having one more crochet meet-up, and hopefully I'll be going to help out with my pretty new crochet needles (I've been inspired, you might say)! Also, as if that's not exciting enough Gretchen Bennett will be there with young art star Joshua Lindenmayer giving temporary tattoos - I can attest to the beauty of her tattoo work, having had my own pink buffalo done earlier this year!

An excerpt from Mandy's Mater Matrix Mother and Medium blog:

SAM Family Programs have been a huge supporter of my project from hosting me at their Teen Art Attack evening to twice hosting me at family programs out at the Olympic Sculpture Park. I am so glad to go to this final event with them. The two programs out at the Sculpture Park were particularly wonderful, as I got to work, share my project, as well as spend time with my own child who often gets the shaft when I get so busy on large projects.

buzzz

(image linked from and courtesy of Mandy's site)

Here's the lineup:

SAM Family Programs: Don’t Miss the Summer Fun!
FAMILY DAY: BUST A MOVE
Presented by TARGET
Saturday, June 27, 10 am–3 pm
SAM Downtown

Make your move through outrageous obstacle courses designed for making art in new ways, like the artists in
Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78. Create collages, recycled art, stencils and see-through paintings. Design temporary tattoos with Joshua Lindenmayer and Gretchen Bennett. Crochet with Mandy Greer. See live painting demos with ArtWorks and Pratt Fine Arts Center.

LIVE PERFORMANCES
* Madcap toymaker Rick Hartman
* Hilarious Zambini Bros. puppet show
* Electrifying tapdancing by Northwest Tap Connection
* Feats by the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts
* Plus facepainting, storytelling and more!

Community Partnerships: Visit the Barnes & Noble Pacific Place store June 26–28 and a portion of your purchases will benefit SAM.

Shaun Kardinal @ Vermillion Gallery, Seattle -- or, How I've Learned to See Myself a Little Differently

I've been hoping to talk about Shaun Kardinal's photography for some time, ever since I saw his work at SOIL and Howard House earlier this year. While he explores several themes in his work, he's currently focused on self portraiture. At first glance, one might make a mistake and think they've seen this obsessive self-documentation on MySpace and in first year art student portfolios, but one couldn't be more wrong - Kardinal's success is in the placement of the lens rather than his vanity. It's not as much a documentation of acts that are happening to him, as it is a purposeful recurrence of what has already happened. To whom it has happened is the question.

When looking at these photographs, I place myself squarely in the frame, replacing the subject. I'm remembering an event that may or may not have happened to me. I'm either not sure or don't know who's there, they haven't been revealed yet. Is it me or someone else? This effect is most successful in pieces which are larger or where the subject is angled more directly in front of the lens. Kardinal could be playing with voyeurism, which he's stated; but he seems more interested in tapping into our sense of sympathy or projection of self on the work. While these moments may have been about him in the beginning, I get the sense they are now less about him and becoming more about us.

I've started thinking of them as a kind of vision-- my seeing / the way we're seen by others / seeing the way we're seen by others. I've always had an obsessive curiosity about the volume of space I take up in the world and I still haven't figured it out. What do I look like to other people? What would I look like (or what would my life look like) if I saw myself through other people's eyes? It might be like this.

Perhaps it's the seemingly unimportant things that lead to our individual identity as a whole, the small everyday experiences which make us who we are. These experiences are universally quirky, awkward, private, peculiar, common. Kardinal's reflective reenactments are a meditation on the mundane -- I am here now in this space, this is what I am doing this morning, these are the things I do when I'm alone, these are the acts which make me who I am. Through his recorded performance he is invoking memory and revealing identity -- his, yours, and ours.

If you haven't stepped out to see it yet, I recommend going it this weekend before the show closes on 5 July. Shaun's work is up at the Vermillion Gallery, 11 Ave E, open every day but Monday from 4-"late"

Shaun Kardinal, Progression Lightjet C-Print, 2008. 20 x 20 inches
image courtesy of the artist

Shaun Kardinal, Go On I'm Listening, Lightjet C-Print, 2008. 20 x 20 inches
image courtesy of the artist