With whom would you weather the last storm?

One of my roommates, who already thinks I’m nuts (as I have recently taken to staging and filming elaborate rituals around the apartment), wanders down to the first floor one Monday evening. He gets half way down the staircase and looks out, but can’t see the floor. Instead, a canopy of colored fabric has risen to mid-stair level. A blanket sea spreads out beneath his feet and flows to the far corners of the finished basement. Swaying slowly in it’s own imagined currents. Shadows dart beneath the folds and fabric ripples on the surface. The underworld of the tent fort is occupied.

“Come on in!” We call. He wades in like a sport as we hoist up the remaining mast and string the last sheets to sail. The tent fort is finished when all of the collectively gathered sheets and blankets, chairs, poles, nets, hammocks, light fixtures, scarves, canvas swatches and tarps are connected to each other with some sort of pin or swath of duct tape.

There was no plan. The only blueprint I had for the evening was a well laid out veggie tray flanked by vodka tonics and friends who were game.

Once we had the structure in place, I took pictures of people in various poses for paintings – some staged and some candid. I’m making paintings with tents in them because they can suggest military outposts, refugee shelters, shantytowns, campgrounds, children’s forts, circus setups, post apocalyptic societies, native villages and romantic alcoves. What a medley! Sorting through all the associations and composing different combinations should keep me busy for a while.

When you look at a simple, low-tech shelter, you can read a lot about its maker and environment. Often its pieces are pulled from the immediate surroundings. Its production is transparent, as opposite to black box architecture and design (systems with fancy façades that render their complex, inner worlds unknowable) that dominate our infrastructure today.

Why go to all this trouble to stage elaborate life-sized references when the end product is a 2D image? (Did I mention drinks, friends and a good playlist?) The photographs that I took from the setup are very helpful to work from. But even more importantly, I find that once I’ve built something, I have a more comprehensive understanding of its form when I go to paint it. I’m able to turn it around in my head better, see it from all sides, so that I can play with and warp it instead of having to accept it as it comes in a still photo.

The other reason I gathered people to my basement was because my paintings are about young people gathering --- the patterns they make and how they group together. It made sense to set up a situation in which this stuff happens naturally. That way I could document the kinds of interactions that I’m interested in exploring “in the wild.” In the narratives that I paint (and write), the characters are often faced with extreme circumstances (environmental catastrophes, crumbling buildings, broken bodies). These were the people that gathered from nearby in Brooklyn when the stakes were low. But what if the waters really were rising and this was the group that got together to weather the storm? Would the structures that we built to stay afloat and the silhouettes of our huddled bodies look at all like this?

Thanks to the models! Check out the multi-talented bunch: Don (video art and mixed media), Siobhan (dance and dance writing), Marie (drawing and bookmaking), Felix (drawing and street art), Itzy (design and mixed media), Anton (journalism), George (film)

Ritual Still

A still from a video Don and I made last night as part of our new project, Ouroborix. There were many takes which meant many glasses of wine which means many glasses of vitamin water this morning.

“They Scorched the Snake But Have Not Killed It,”

was Banquo’s whispered plea. I wish I could remember what else he said to me with such intensity when he locked me in that room with the simple wooden furniture. The servant’s quarters. A bare alter and a bed. I was a woman he used to know. It was so good to see me again. He anointed me with oil and assured me that I was chosen for some great purpose. I was silent, as I had been instructed from the beginning. But he lifted my mask off and I guess my eyes were big as saucers. Wide open because nothing feels as good and as terrifying as surrendering your reality.

I knew what I was getting into, or I thought I did, when I lined up outside the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea to see ‘Sleep No More.’ I had brushed up on my Macbeth the night before. But the vibrant, violent world than greeted me inside was far more realized than I could have hoped for.

The anti-chamber helps. A winding, light-less hallway spills into the holding pen where revelers start and end their nights. This space is a functioning jazz bar where guests mingle with each other, throw off their old-worldly cares and get a taste of the new reality (absinth-flavored) before being subsumed. It is an effective transition to the surreal, because although the year is suddenly 1930, the jazz singer is a jazz singer and the champagne is champagne.

Inside, the first thing that hits you is that people can move differently in this world; there has been some shift in the physical laws. We’ve all seen dance performances before, but these people can climb walls, they can fall in and out of possessed states, they can fairly fly around the room. They have obviously been swept up in a super-human storm led by forces that are out of their control. The witches can read but not change them. It is this volatile combination of elements that makes the Macbeth story just as potent four hundred years after its birth.

The occupants of the McKittrick Hotel are tormented by guilt and wracked with lust. They hurl their bodies at walls and each other with wild abandon. The brutal percussion of all the falling, slamming, punching, shoving, growling, panting, clawing and lunging starts to keep beat in your ribcage like the baseline at a rock concert.

The question is not “Do I believe?” but rather, “How deep down this rabbit hole can I fall?”

The voyeurs are ghosts -- observing silently from beneath identical, white masks. But at least we are on the same side of the looking glass as the action and can haunt the performers at will. It is refreshing to be able to bodily respond to a physical performance, to empathize with and echo an inspiring movement, to chase down something that catches your fancy.

Once I climbed through the window of a mental hospital ward and landed in a forest. The fog that snaked through the labyrinth of braided trees was glowing ultramarine. The space was big enough so that the corners of the room could disappear in blue clouds. I wandered alone for a while until I stumbled onto a cabin where a nurse was reading quietly at the window, her hut scaled on the inside with thousands of hospital records butchered like clumsy snowflakes.

Because I’m hopelessly insatiable when it comes to dream worlds and alternate realities, I had a hard time dragging myself away from that glitzy jazz bar at the end of the night. A sultry singer with a septum piercing and a sequined gown like a second-skin was crooning. A guy was asking me to explain Macbeth to him one more time. The performers were emerging to unwind for the night.

I asked the male witch, “Have you read the night circus?” He was beautiful and willowy, with distinctive dark eyeliner. His character was the provocateur, the button pusher, the tempter, the hedonist, the spark that set stuff ablaze. I had just seen him naked with a giant bull’s head on, dancing feverishly, leaping onto tables with blood running from his belly down his stomach to the curve of his thigh. I had just watched Macbeth kneel beneath him and lick it off as a strobe light and a screaming techno beat tore threw any last remaining inhibitions or distance we had between ourselves and the soiled fabric of everything else. “Of course!” he said enthusiastically. “The author saw the show in Boston a while back. I think it gave her a lot of ideas.”

Then I thanked Banquo for the anointment. “Oh you!” He was pleased to see his silent ghost in the jazz bar of the half-alive. In purgatory. In ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ (in which the Big Bang starts over from scratch again each night). He was trying to catch the last train, so we ended up walking to the subway together, climbing down different staircases and standing across from each other on the platform. As I am physically incapable of turning away from magical potential, I watched him until he got onto his train. He walked to the window, put his hand on the glass and held my gaze until he was swallowed by the tunnel.

I swore the scented oil on my palms was bleeding into the stale subway air. Or some of the witch’s calcite clung to my hair because, the whole way home, people kept coming up to me, asking me about this or that, directions, where I was from. They could tell I’d been elsewhere. If we had all been dining at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they would have told their waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”