Opening night at SELF

Opening Night at SELF
VENEZIA, ITALY
SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES

Opening night was at Palazzo Z'anardi

The palace was beautiful, the coolness of the marble was welcome as the day was hot and wearing all black on a hot night can be stifling if I'm wanting to have my attention fully on all the people I'm to interact with.

Attention to details are important. Last minute preparation required making a new headdress for the show. Fortunately this version was even better than my last. I had taken some precautions by bringing extra materials with me and taken "just in case items" in the even of a mishap. Extra tape, Gaff tape, sewing materials, glue, cardboard to cut on top of, etc...  I could not foresee however that an overzealous application  of Gorilla glue I brought along would bubble out of the seams as it cured. Two hours of cutting bevels and careful measuring were saved by shaving the frothy thick glue off by shaving with a razor and painting the pasty yellow residue with a last minute application of Mascara which was the only black paint to be found. I felt like I was in an art Survivor Episode and so glad for my field improvising capabilities developed over the years and also by observing how others learn to make do in other countries.

This is such an old and beautiful city I can not but help feel spirits still hanging around their beloved Venice. The other night I would have sworn I felt one above me when I went to bed. They are welcome to me. I feel very at home here, I know I've lived here before. I felt it the instant we got off the train and looked at the buildings across the Grand Canal. My skin at the back of my neck tingled and I could feel myself thinking "you are home". You wouldn't think it by the way I get lost walking around here. GPS is nice but there's nothing like stopping to ask  a hundred times for directions and interacting with people. I think that's nice and it develops a very fine sense of knowing when someone doesn't know what they are talking about yet they still offer you directions which would take you not only on a thirty minute detour but in the exact opposite direction of where you need to go. This is another side effect of SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES.

At this point in my work I know there's very little I need to do to prepare for performing other than clear my head and be open to anyone.  I don't really want to call what I wear a costume as it's much more than that. In some way it's a metaphor for body or nothing or furniture as some people treat it that way. I have a profound appreciation for the Burqa now. I can sense that now in these robes and head dress, to some I don't exist. I have in common what the homeless feel and women and the unseen or not looked at. Being a "normal" human is really no different, We are all active inside our heads and the level of interaction we have with others can be some what determined by others and mostly by ourselves, it is our responsibility as always if we wish to be and interact with the world.

Although people will come up to me most of the night or me to them and they have what ever what they have on and their hair and makeup looks however, what I remember through the night and for days and months after is their eyes. Yet something more than that remains with me. I am connected now.


They have communicated their things to me and I have listened and communicated back in the thought world and whether I have understood or duplicated exactly what has come across or not  it stays there. I feel blessed to have seen so many shiny eyes in a night. they are so beautiful. As my Italian language skills are abysmal even with 4 years of Latin under my belt, wordless communication is beautiful, all I need is the eyes.

In the course of the evening I interacted with some children. There was a little girl there with my friend Andrea. He told me at the end of the night that she said "I looked at him and communicated to him with my brain." I loved that.

When I think of what I want to communicate to others, I suppose I could communicate things like, "I'm here for you" or "Thank you for visiting" or "You have incredible eyes" but most often  I'm thinking "We are stardust and the galaxy or universe is so big and You are it with me and perhaps if we all see that the world would be better.".

Most often what I'm getting from others is that words are not necessary in the totality of things. If I were to position myself out in space someplace and see how big the universe really is and how small our planet really is , there is nothing but awe and we are connected by that with our eyes.

Really it is amazing, if you look at a rock or a building and you think of how small that is in comparison to the sun or Ceres or Orion's Belt. It shows to me how small and insignificant daily words are, though we need them or think we do. So here we are with this small insignificant rock yet someone picks it up to throw at a building or another human.

I could say that Venice for all its history is the most incredible place in the world, the city of Masks, to do this piece but in truth I feel the same when looking into someone's eyes here as I do in some abandoned building in a run down part of St Louis. The eyes and people I interact with there and here leave me the same, blessed to have had the experience and resolved to continue this piece as it is important and I can see it has impacted others there and here and anywhere I perform it.

Tomorrow I start street performance.

Speak to Me Only with Thine Eyes

As the diversities in the world are now more exposed by enhanced media intrusion, cultures are clashing with one world wishing homogenization and the the other, retention of its cultures and values with violent means being resorted to by both.

Where do I begin and does someone else start? By removing words and by limiting physical cues such as smiles and other facial expressions it can be somewhat intimidating to approach others whether they are known to us or not.

The concept of this piece involves a small stage set converted into a headdress. All other elements are a stark black allowing for a creation of an archetype which is a conglomerate of world religions and culture whether cassock, burqa, academic or judicial robes, Saturnian High Priest, ascetic and others.

Black has come to represent intervention, portal or messenger to God, religious ritual, shielding, mourning, protection, isolation and disconnection. The chest placard: SPEAK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES, sets the boundaries for engagement within a reasonably intimate distance.

At whatever level there is an element of absorption of something from each other. Perhaps this can be a step towards questioning to what degree we interact with others and to what degree we protect or must protect ourselves and to what degree we allow our anonymity to prevail.

My intent as the artist and performer is to encourage this type of silent communication and that we will leave small silent pieces of our selves in others to help bridge this gap between our worlds.

Acknowledgement to Dylan Cooper for facilitating and photographing this project.

Sufi pants and vision

She makes peanut butter sandwiches to make our dog love her better

My dog laughs out loud at vacuum cleaner jokes

 she knows she does a better job when it comes to food.

She wears Sufi pants and dreams of large stitched canvases hung in front of museum windows with large patches of grey and charcoal and white and china red so they can be seen through windows from hillsides across from the parking lots of museums

The paintings are done in warehouses with white walls 

We sew 5 foot rolls of canvas, stitched together and gessoed 

before the paints are done on the floors and hung from the walls or ceiling in warehouses owned by the Drury’s who let him paint on the weekends in place no one has ever spoken or thought of...

The curator of the museum wants a large painting to hang on the walls

I saw it in my vision this morning after reading the Anthropologie catalogue

And I know it will happen

The mouse knows you

He has small mouse names for you…

They talk about you like mice do

And know small mouse things about you…

Like how you fold your underwear and the lint in the corner of your drawer and how your notebooks smell and taste

Yes he can taste your words and your ink and he reads your words and finds comfort in them. He eats them, yes your words are like food to the mouse.

Your pages line his nest, torn to pieces like the dreams you once wrote for only you to see. Now he sleeps his tiny muzzle turned under his paws and tiny claws, dozing....resting breathing, he sighs amongst your words, comforted and dreaming tiny mouse dreams where he runs in tunnels and his dozing limbs run and jerk as he thinks of running in his dreams….

Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.

Thin BLue Line-Domestic Violence

Have been working on a new piece called Thin Blue Line-Black Eyed Madonna. Initial interviews have been done and after speaking to counselors at The Network for Sexual Violence it seemed that the crux of the problem centers around "control". I don't know that I am in agreement with this yet as I look at line drawings of children that they use to indicate where someone touched them inappropriately or worse.
Control has now taken on a new meaning with sinister overtones. One doesn't think of control as a bad thing when operating a car or plane or a nuclear reactor or when walking your child across the street but in a relationship look out it is a veritable minefield.
Control in a relationship has driven many off the brink more often than any other element. This bad control then starts one down the slippery slope into the cauldron of blame and regret. I think this is the direction my studies are beginning to take me.