The Dub Ball

Collaboration.

I love a good backlash movement. I love artists that buck trends, retrograde coolness, or find new ways to use the latest trend in technology. Medium Troy, a Eugene-based dub band, is doing just that. Medium Troy, with the help of dozens of artists local to Eugene, Oregon (and a couple of nationally known headliners, RJD2, ahem) is putting on a multimedia dub extravaganza this month at the Hult Center, the largest fine arts performance hall in the city. Why there? Because this is no ordinary electronica concert. This dub ball is backed up by a live orchestra. It is an approach to electronic music that has long been wanting from the scene. Audiences miss the sound of real instruments played in real time, the filling of a stage with performers rather than staring at one dude behind a laptop, and the ability to see the music being played. Medium Troy recognizes that and knows that sometimes, the new wave emerges out of an old-school idea. Medium Troy is putting their neck on the line to prove that electronic music can be cross genre and cross demographic.

Get your tickets here:
 http://www.wowhall.org/

Call to Artists

Create.
Girl Gone Wild is actively seeking projects from all mediums to showcase to a broader audience. I am looking especially for under-represented artists, authors, musicians and activists with projects that are compelling, compassionate, address social or political issues, or are just plain amazing. Do you have a project that you think is a good fit with Girl Gone Wild? Read the blog, then go to www.rubygonewild.com and send me a brief description of your work and a link to your project. I will be interviewing and writing about a project a week for the next several months and would love to hear from you. Please share this opportunity with others!

Also, a taste of a previous, proto-profile:

Magdalene.

There is a quiet revolution taking place in popular music led by artists interested in both the evolution of digital sound and the complexities offered by the rhythms and melodies of traditional cultural music. Pushing past the early pioneers of fusion, Paul Simon's Graceland, for example, recent bands such as Beirut and Beats Antique have eschewed any sense of Americanism and instead have modernized and digitized old-world sounds. Now, bands like Black Magdalene are taking the strong vocals and dominant guitar and bass that characterizes American rock and layering it with North African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European rhythms, sounds, and mythology to create a wholly new, and wholly modern sound. They call it Organic Darkwave.

Listen:
http://www.reverbnation.com/blackmagdaleneband

Photograph:
http://www.digitallatte.com/

See Jane

Jaded.

There is a powerful new voice in dark art emerging out of Eugene, Oregon. Jaded Jane is an assemblage of images and stories that are both beautiful and distressing. Jaded Jane is is about bad memories, pain, and long-held secrets; it is about abuse, violence, and neglect. More importantly, it is about solace.

The creator of the site is dedicated to giving voice to people in search of outlet and catharsis. I spoke with her recently in her studio in Eugene, a vast expanse of white-washed industrial walls that stand in stark contrast to her dark imagery. She explained that the project emerged as a way to address agency in the face of terrible events. "People come to me with these extreme experiences. So many of them have slipped through the cracks and often there is little to no therapy. You listen to these stories and go, I don't know what to do with this." She says. "So I think, okay, what does this look like?"

Once the idea for an image set has formed a team of Jaded Jane artists, all volunteers, goes about the construction of the elaborate visual design that characterizes the project's aesthetic. Custom couture clothing, hair and makeup, set design, it is all donated by talented, compassionate, and discreet local artists. Not everyone can work on a project like this. There have been problems, print shops that balk at printing such hard to look at images, submerged women curled around stereos in tiny bath tubs, an image of a chili pepper being inserted into a baby doll's behind. "We have had people that didn't want to print the work, but we called and spoke to them about the project and explained what we do and they changed their minds. I know these images are difficult, but art needs experience to have meaning. I make images that beg for context because they are so disturbing." And there is the personal process of the story teller. "I always ask the person why they want these images. Is it to purge? Is it to hang in your house? Or do you just want me to make it so you can burn it? I think there are a lot of reasons to want to do this."

You can see the Jaded Jane images in person and meet the creator this month at the Bossa Nova Ballroom in Portland as part of a RAW Artists event and visit it anytime online to view, support, or share your story.

http://www.rawartists.org/tracysydor

Visit:
http://jadedjane.com/

Salvation Mountain

Paint.

Leonard Knight died last week at the age of 82. Known for nothing, he lived a quiet life In the desert bringing to life his own unique oasis of art made from materials salvaged from the desert and donated by passers by and the curious.

I love to see quiet labors of love and artistry played out in simple lives. I love to be reminded of how much art, how much creative time and energy can be into projects that exist only to satisfy the creator, not for financial gain or prestige.

Look:

Pictures:
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/hard-times-on-salvation-mountain.html

http://cowbird.com/story/10444/Hello_Universal_God/

http://www.editingluke.net/2010/11/salvation-mountain-pictures.html

Hard and Steady

Work.

I have a hard time expressing to even those that know me well just how hard it is to dance and train day after day.  Typically, people are over-impressed when they first hear that you dance all day and treat you like an invalid, only to assume later that since you do it every day you must not be tired at all. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.  From the archives of Life Magazine, "The Hard and Steady Work of Dancers"

http://life.time.com/culture/the-hard-steady-work-of-creating-beauty-ballet-dancers-rehearse-1936/?iid=lf|mostpop#14

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/peto/petosample.htm

The Glass Slipper

Ballerina.

Dame Margot Fonteyn was perhaps the worlds best known and certainly most loved ballerina.  She revitalized ballet in post World War II Europe and brought it into the American mainstream in the 1950's.  She was a master of the classical vocabulary, and set the bar to which prima ballerinas are still judged. She performed into her late sixties.  She did this in spite of the fact that she was a homely child, plump, and lacking the the long neck and legs desired of ballerinas.  She was ambitious and unstoppable, she dyed her hair, got a nose job, and trained with an unprecedented diligence and fortitude.  She was a remarkable, astonishing dancer, with the ability to make almost anything look effortless.  She stands as one of the great beautys of her time. 

But by all accounts, in spite of her success and legions of adoring fans, she was lonely, isolated, unhappy, and largely taken advantage of throughout her life.  She was childless, unmarried, and without close friends.  She died penniless, alone, and nearly unable to walk.

I wonder about the sacrifices we make.  I am curious about ambition, envy, and ego and where they intersect with discipline and the pursuit of greatness.  I look at the choices people make, the trade offs, bargains, and business deals, the ways in which we get the things we want.  I think that work is good for us and I believe that sacrifice, of time, energy, leisure, is a part of work. I want to understand the tipping point, where desire becomes study, becomes lifestyle, becomes success, and how it can consume some people and nourish others. What are the things you want in life?  What are you willing to do for them?  Will you work, sweat, and fight for it?  Will you lie, cheat or steal?  Will it be worth it?

References/Images:

http://www.myspace.com/joke-joanne/photos/

Post Secret

Shhhhhhh.

There is a hugely popular bog called PostSecret that is an ongoing public art project in which people submit secrets written on one side of a postcard.  A lot of the posts are funny, and most of them are visually interesting; until they aren't.  There are posts about abortions, rape, infidelity, and addiction, there are the kinds of awful things you cannot make up in the first place and then cannot get rid of after you see them.  Sometimes it is hard to tell if the post is from a true confessor in need of anonymous catharsis, or a thrill seeker pushing their fantasy onto a voyeuristic audience.  Every time I go to this blog I come away feeling a little dirty and depressed.  

I understand the compulsion towards confession, especially anonymous confession.  I think we all need the weight of our secrets, the actions of our past selves or the actions of others that we have suffered or witnessed, to be lifted, even momentarily.  But it is difficult to face the enormity of our collective hidden lives. The part of me that wants for people to be healthy and well reels from just how unhappy, dysfunctional, and cruel we really are.  I'm not sure that it makes me feel better to know that people feel badly about it.  

Candy Chang, a New Orleans-based public artist has taken a similar  but more positive and inspiring approach to confession as public art in several of her installations.  In Confessions, she prompted people to write confessions on posted slips of paper in a contemplative space inspired by Shinto shrines.  Her acknowledgement of the influence of both Shinto and Catholic concepts of confession in her work are what distinguishes it from PostSecret.  Confessions has none of the sensationalism, no feeling of desperation or attention grabbing that you find on Post Secret.  The result is far more profound and simple, and the tone of the confessions decidedly more positive.  It turns out that in a contemplative space people confess love in addition to loss.

Secrets are like anything else, to keep them carries a price and a weight.  There are lots of ways to unburden yourself and there are lots of people with secrets.  Consider letting go of one of yours.

References/Links:

Post Secret:

http://www.postsecret.com/

Confessions:

http://candychang.com/confessions/

Before I Die:

http://candychang.com/before-i-die-in-nola/

A State of Mind

Silver.

Vicki Topaz, a San Francisco based photographer recently showed a collection of portraits of women, all with gray or silver hair in an exhibit entitled Silver: A
State of Mind.  The exhibition is intended to investigate what it means to be an aging woman and what it means to be an authentic person.  It is not a collection of pictures of old women.  It is not a feminist diatribe.  The collection is an intimate and touching collection of women, just as they are.  It does, though, beg the question, what value do women hold as they age in a youth-based culture? Are we still desirable? Is going gray and accepting it, necessarily political? 

I don't think so.  I think that it is personal.  I do not believe that I have diminished with age in either beauty or person-hood.  I feel myself improving, fine-tuning, and continuing to learn. I take these things, lines, gray hairs, as reminders of my hard work and the triumph of having made it this far.  I hold fast to the belief that beauty radiates and that a lovely soul never goes out of style.

To view the work of Vicki Topaz:

http://www.womenonaging.com/

http://www.vickitopaz.com/

References Cited:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/booming/silver-becomes-her-in-a-shows-portraits.html?ref=arts

Playing For Change

allegro.

Playing for Change is an organization dedicated to the creation and propagation of peace through shared humanity and aesthetics, the playing of music. More specifically, Playing for Change is an international collective of musicians that play benefit concerts for and build music and art schools in impoverished communities. The project is rooted in the belief that music is an equalizer, a common thread that allows people to transcend distance and boundaries, be they political, economic, cultural, or ideological, that music is a path to peace. They illustrate this by producing mosaic videos of musicians from around the world playing the same song, somehow together, as a one-world choir, despite the distance. And they seem to play straight up into heaven, and right through to your soul.

They have a point. Music unites.

Watch and Listen:
http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes

Participate:
http://www.playingforchange.com/participate

A Portrait of the Artist

chameleon.

The art of self portraiture has a long and varied history. It's practice is well documented primarily as a technical tool and lesser form of realism from early Chinese history before it was revitalized by the likes of Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. Samuel Fosso, the Cameroon-born photographer, takes it a step further. Fosso creates portraits of other, often famous, people from the context of his own self portrait. To put it another way, he takes pictures of other people by taking pictures of himself. He presents himself as Nelson Mandela, Malcom X, Angela Davis. It's uncanny. A beautiful manipulation. His art takes on renewed potency when viewed in light of the current socioeconomic situation. A lot of people, by choice or not, are scrutinizing themselves and looking for a way to be reinvented as someone altogether new. Fosso's work presents us with a tangible representation of this metamorphosis and begs the question, who might you become?

sources:

http://thedreamhunter.blogspot.com/
www.cccb.org

New York Times

The Dancer: I

legs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLG9DheSh-c

One of the distinguishing features of dance as an artform is the masochism inherent in its participants. As company members, our lives and bodies are not our own, but offered up, sacrificed for the greater good, for someone else's vision. My knees look like this because of a piece choreographed by a good friend that we've been working on for a number of weeks. A piece of hip hop that is proving to be beyond the grasp of his dancers, classically trained ballet dancers. Its not just that the movement is unfamiliar, which it is, but we lack vocabulary to put to the steps, which means we can't say the choreography to ourselves as we dance, and we have to learn it by muscle memory, a tedious and repetitive process. But mostly, the piece is actually painful, and at times frightening, with its knee turns and handstands with splits, particulary in the practice studio with its hard floors and low ceilings. But we love this man, and he's a true artist, so we dance, knowing that it isn't good enough and that we're running out of time. Pull it together. Do the artist justice. Collect the bruises to show you worked for it.

"If you dance, you dance because you have to. Every dancer hurts, you know."~ Katherine Dunham