Ekphrasis

He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's water,

and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,

and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens,

the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion

and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon,

who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion

and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean. 
(Description of Achilles' shield from The Iliad, 483-489)

I saw this on my way home from writing this blog post at a cafe! Chillin on a street corner. Certainly a sign...

Ekphrasis. Sounds sinister. Like in the medical, hesitate to Google it kind of way. “But really it’s creative alchemy,” Caleb, the Classics PhD student, assured us. “It’s a dramatic description of art in a piece of literature.” We were circled around him story-hour-style. The MIMA space had been emptied of furniture, musical equipment, my paintings and the surprising number of lambskins that usually adorn its surfaces to make way for an incoming Pratt show. Only a handful of essential instruments and a lone painting, too big to shove into my car, were left standing.

When a work of art is described through another medium, it morphs and becomes a new piece of art in this form. Ekphrasis isn’t about exhaustively cataloguing the parts. It’s about translating the impact. One early, powerful example of this is the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad. The shield is hewn by the god Hephaestus after Achilles’ original armor is stolen by the Trojans and the death of his friend throws him into a state of mad bloodlust. The description of the shield’s concentric rings of imagery is epic, encompassing all of the senses. Within the bold, detailed metalwork, lutes and lyres provide a dynamic soundtrack; reeds sway in windy marshes; characters argue and marry, dance and chop each other to bits on the battlefield.

These stood their ground and fought a battle by the banks of the river,

and they were making casts at each other with their spears bronze-headed;

and Hate was there with Confusion among them, and Death the destructive;

she was holding a live man with a new wound, and another

one unhurt, and dragged a dead man by the feet through the carnage.

The clothing upon her shoulders showed strong red with the men's blood. (433-438)

These pictures are navigated much like a god from on high might effortlessly zoom in and out of the worlds below, moving close in to see a maiden collecting flowers for a festival and then zooming out for a panoramic view of the cosmos. Scholars and artists have tried to map out the shield of Achilles and, although there have been many interpretations, the scenes depicted within resist being frozen in a 2-D plane by mortal hands. Words are necessary to communicate the magic of an object made by the blacksmith of the gods.

Then Caleb announced that this week our song-writing workshop would stem from my painting. (The one left standing. Which was fitting because the painting is from my Outpost series and is about the last remaining thing in an environment hell-bent on tearing it down.) It would be our own “visual to musical” version of ekphrasis. We started by asking questions about the painting. Just questions, no answers. “Is it being built or falling apart?” “Is there any way out or in?” “What’s making the light?” “Who lives there?” “Are they happy?”

'Honey I'm home,' she said. The wind turned its mouth up at the corners.

This won’t surprise any recent MFA graduates, but these are not the questions that artists get asked in an academic or critical setting. More often you will hear, “How are the derivative, impressionistic marks in the bottom left corner detracting from the formalistic unity?” But these were refreshing inquiries and way more representative of the way I talk to myself about the things that I make. Then, each of the musicians came up with a phrase associated with the piece, set it to music and played it for the group. With all these melodic fragments floating around in our heads, we began to play, improvise together, build something in the spirit of the thing.

Playing the Building

MIMA and I met for the first time at Princeton. It was Indian summer and that Kingdom of Learning was green-drained and autumn brilliant. Universities are in their element in the fall – the pace is right. Unlike the stillness of winter or the silliness of the warmer months, the fall casts campuses with a dignified, wizened air. Princeton students bustled up and down the grounds, kicking up leaves like bio-bright plankton, wrapped in wool sweaters, clutching mugs of warm tonics.

MIMA is a creative collective that provides music workshops for kids with limited resources around the world. This was their 10 Year Anniversary and they were celebrating by bringing their music and methods back to their place of origin. I’d been recruited by friends to assist in transforming Terrace, the most hippie Eating Club (not saying much when you’re used to Oberlin’s Co-ops, the most hippie of which is constantly pushing the boundaries of the word), into a Living Instrument. Each room was to embody a different character of music: dissonance, consonance, rhythm and silence to name a few.

Laini and I getting dressed in the study.

I was cast as a dryad (ß favorite phrase ever) and was put in charge of the Bacchanal-themed entrance hall along with fellow woodland spirits Laini and Kate-Lynn (painter and poet respectively). Our job was to usher in the collegiate recruits, strip them of as many clothing layers as they would part with and cover them with body paint (!). It was the anti-chamber, the portal between the codes and protocols of university life and something more playful.

The gears of the Living Instrument were set to start up at dark, so we spent the afternoon taking stock of our room and the beautiful fall grounds and then combined them. We dragged in bags of leaves and branches and ornamented the windows and tables with drapes and garlands. Then we went upstairs to a stately study (leather couches and Viking-sturdy tables), threw the remainder of our scarves and clothes into a giant colorful pile, and went about wrapping each other up nymph-style. It was clearly a room that would raise a disapproving eyebrow to such a flurry of ladies’ garments. Other MIMA members were donning bright onesie bodysuits, sumo second skins and Mexican wrestling masks. There were definitely clothing items that never made it out of that costuming cyclone alive. I swear a grumpy armchair swallowed some of the more flamboyant items out of spite.

The line to enter the Living Instrument ran long around the side of the building as night settled in. When each person entered, they were handed a small glass of ritual punch before being lead into the belly of the beast. Inside, they were guided throughout the house and directed in different exercises by MIMA musicians. I would hardly recognize these team leaders when I saw them later without their war paint. I had to re-meet them when we started hanging out as civilians in Brooklyn. And still, their alter egos sometimes flicker across their plainclothes, Clark Kent-stylings.

In the afternoon at Terrace, there had been a bright, open sunroom where students breakfasted. But no light came though the glass that night and the space was filled with a giant plastic bubble that the recruits filtered into at the close of their tour. Inside, the ears met nothing but the soft whirring of fans that kept the ceiling afloat. It was the silence room. Signs were held up to take us through different breathing exercises, to quiet and focus the mind.

So then the masses cleared out, most likely funneling into the nearest frat party. The MIMA managers, dressed as all manner of mythical beasts, circled up around a blue-suited Martian who bounded around the inside of our ring, leading us in a chant that grew and swelled and exploded into a primal scream and then melted into dance. Wild lose yourself dance at the hands of DJs you could trust your rhythms to. Who would build the beat slowly and wait until you were just dying for the music to peak and then take you to an epic height and cradle your descent.

We dragged ourselves into the hotel lobby just before the sun came up, a molting mess of melting mutant parts and raw human skin exposed. Blinking fiercely and working to get our spines steady, we looked like we had just hatched out of some psychedelic cesspool. Dripping colors onto the beige linoleum. The man at the desk didn’t look up as he handed us our keys.

The next morning found us sprawled on Princeton’s Elysian Fields, drawing energy up from the plush grass underneath. Gentle bouts of guitar and yoga and conversation would start up and then fade into the sunshine as we worked ourselves back up to consciousness. And of course there was Terrace’s house-made breakfast buffet complete with everything. (Yeah, they had that. And those.)

A communal painting at MIMA's new space in Brooklyn.

MIMA music party and reception for my painting show.

So why the flashback to this musical evening a year ago? Well, as it happens, MIMA set up headquarters in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn this January (relocating from Brazil). And so did I. Their space -- exposed beams, white walls, high ceilings – plays host to all manner of jam sessions, teacher trainings, workshops for kids, dance parties, yoga classes and communal painting parties (that was me). It’s becoming my second living room and the hive brain that’s based there is a powerful, creative organism.

If you want to join in on future events, shoot me an email and I’ll keep you posted. I have paintings up now and we’re planning an epic Folk Fe(a)st for May 12th.

MIMA Brooklyn

MIMA Music

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.”

Goldfish Grow to Their Corners

Geoff oggling Mimi's guest bedroom.

I recently visited the studios of two artists. Feisty, redheaded ladies with insatiable appetites for silliness and adventure and a lust for the brightest colors they can get their hands on. They are the kind of effortlessly generous women that can hardly find enough lucky targets to pour their affection onto. Both are figurative painters whose work walks right off the canvas and into the social sphere with life-sized portraits of friends and art scenes and the ways we gather. Sometimes their canvases even warp, grow a third dimension and morph into walls and installations. Neither artist finds reason to separate life from work so, as a friend of theirs, you’re never quite sure when you’re being framed.

Why bother to differentiate art vs a dinner party? (Painters from left: Mimi, Laini Nemett, Ellen Schneiderman, Geoffrey Miller)

They are also at opposite ends of their careers -- Laura looking up from her just-sprouted practice and Mimi looking down over her tall, lush one that bears strong, intricate branches and encases many concentric rings.

Mimi's.

Oh. And both Laura and Mimi have big live/work spaces (as pictured in all of these photos), which is the reason I thought to write about them together in the first place. Huge. The word “cavernous” comes to mind and can’t be shaken.

Mimi's studio space.

Mimi Gross spent a chunk of her twenties traveling around Italy in a horse-drawn carriage, supporting herself hand to mouth with puppet shows performed out of the back. She’s shot the shit with just about everyone you’ve read about in your 20^th century art textbook. Her stories of travel and art world exploits are endless and spellbinding. It’s hard to fathom all that she’s seen and shaped and loved and left behind.

Early portrait of Mimi.

The one piece Mimi did about her travels in Berlin. A light box diorama. Simple and a bit slapstick -- I was immediately brought back there and felt the weight of the city in the paper construction that must have weighed next to nothing.

She has lived and worked in this giant flat in Manhattan for (I believe) over 30 years. The walls are stacked salon style to high ceilings with bright, bold art that documents and fictionalizes so many pasts it’s dizying. And the other half of the space is all new work – her studio. I think what leaves me most in awe of Mimi, and it’s quite a list to top, is the freshness of her palette. Her studio is like an enormous, overgrown garden. The new work climbing up the walls, ceiling and floor, is obviously on some sort of super fertilizer.

The bedroom portion of Laura's room.

Laura Hudson, who graduated from MICA’s MFA program with me last May, is discovering and staking out for the first time the territory that will be hers to mine and build on. Like me, she has little more than instinct and the voices in her head (painting teachers, the elder art gods, buddies, favorite musicians, Tom Bombadil (that could just be me)) to guide her to strange new lands. At this point the path seems arbitrary and disjointed, but I have a feeling that when she looks back over her travels, the path will show itself to be patterned with purpose and direction. Laura is someone who is sensitive enough to feel the pull of her “true North” and bold enough to follow it blindly.

The studio part.

She chose to stay in Baltimore after she graduated in large part because of the space she lives in, one of the rooms in the H&H Building – a vital organ of Bmore’s grassroots art and music scene, housing 3 galleries and 2 music venues (the count changes weekly). The show that is up now at Gallery Four, Laura’s floor, “Cowboys and Engines” by Dustin Carlson, stakes out the vast, industrial space brilliantly. The director of the Baltimore Museum of Art told me that she thought it was one of the strongest shows she’s seen, anywhere, in years.

Laura's door opens onto this.

Laura has a solo show coming up at the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia in the fall and, to prep, they let her throw a sleepover party in the space. She filmed it and is plotting life-sized paintings of the revelers that she will hang for the opening as a similar crowd fills the room.

And then this.

And finally this.

Fight for Me

Perseus slaying the dragon and freeing the maiden by Edward Burne-Jones.

If you want to marry my daughter, you’re going to have to find the ring I’ve dropped into the middle of the Red Sea. If she is your heart’s desire, you will have to find the secret place where she goes to dance each night. You must beat her in a race, even though she plays dirty. You must eat 300 oxen -- skin, bones and all -- and then drink 100 casks of wine in one night. If you fail in this, I will cut off your head. But if you succeed, the kingdom and the most beautiful bride will be yours.

The Grimm brothers recorded more than a few of these deadly trials. The common fairytale trope works to prove the strength and dedication (love never seems to factor in) of the competitor to the one in possession of his object of desire. It also impresses upon our protagonist the weight of what he’s getting himself into. And it’s not all boys slaying dragons (although it’s a lot of boys slaying dragons). If you happen to be a girl, you can line up outside the castle to present yourself as the most beautiful maiden in the land. If you win, the kingdom is yours. But if you are outshined, you will be drowned in the lake.

Brutal, right? Trial by fire with the highest of stakes. But isn’t it preferable to sitting at home and mailing letters into the void, checking the horizon for a horse-backed messenger every morning for months, not even sure if your courier was waylaid by bandits or delayed in a tavern of ill repute? Isn’t it better than biting your nails down to and past the quick and venting to anyone that will listen that if you could just see the princess, just for a moment, if you could entertain her with stories about your travels to the East and play her that new song on the lute and if she could just see the way this season’s harvest has made your body strong and tan then she would choose you above all the others? Instead of cursing the advantage of men whose fathers are close with the King and can bypass all that red tape, wouldn’t it be better to have the chance to win or lose her on your own merit?

I thought about this a lot when I returned from the Vermont Studio Center to my parents’ house in Connecticut this November. I spent a few days converting the basement into a studio space and then dove headlong into a stream of job applications. (A one-way stream, which carries time and effort and carefully crafted sentences away from you at a very fast pace and returns nothing but new waters.) There has been a lot written lately about how hard it is for us young folk to find jobs, especially in creative fields. The market, especially in New York, is saturated with academically decorated, creative minds and there’s just not that much money in the arts to go around.

After a week of sending out email after email into the web abyss, I spent a day in North Hampton with an artist friend. I was walking his dog, which looked like a tiny, toy luckdragon, down a bustling street and I was afraid someone was going to step on it. Its bones as delicate as a bird’s. “I wish I could just fight a dragon,” I said.

“Huh?” Don said.

“Sometimes I wish I could just fight a dragon or find some really far away herb or walk through a burning forest in some epic, bloody trial to get a job. And if I didn’t make it, fine. But at least I would have a chance to fight for what I want instead of sending out all of these faceless emails.”

“I think you’d be good at fighting a dragon,” he said.

“Thanks. Can I use you as a reference?”

Anyway, “Be careful what you wish for,” etc. etc. I got a call soon after from an artist’s studio. I’ve been a huge fan of this woman’s work and philosophy for years. They asked me to come in and work with a team of assistants to fabricate a large-scale installation. It was pitched as a trial period for a permanent position. I made it sound like I was already in NY, so when they asked if I could start the next morning, I said “Sure!”

In progress installation.

It was already dinnertime, but I called a true friend in Brooklyn (“Can I move in with you tonight and stay with you for an unknown length of time?”), packed in an hour and a half, and worked a seven-day week. It turned out when I got there that the permanent positions were already full. But, long story short, there have been many challenges, obstacles, puzzles and riddles to work through as an assistant. I am still at the studio and, although I don’t know how long it will last, it’s good to know that I’ve had the chance to prove my mettle.

Weaving gold tinsel.