And now… time for pirouettes

Documention from previous post.

Inspired by the costumes of Louise Borgeois, Pablo Picasso and the Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer I start experimenting with the lampshades as costumes. Their shapes and how they adjust to my body remind me of shields and shells…

I see performance as a great medium to lose one’s inhibitions and at that point I think I needed a lot of that. My mentor is senior lecturer in the performance and theathre BA course at Brighton. He has encouraged me to work more in performance, to use my sense of humour and comedy in my work, throughtout dance and theatre and using my body to speak up. I still finding ways of achieving moving sculptures with this approach being one of them.

These photographs are only existing as photographs, there is not a thread here but purely just as experimental as the installations before.

I wonder If I’ve had being influenced at some point in my journey by theatre, specially Theatre of the Absurd, carnivals and Comedia dell’arte if I haven’t done this MA.

I’m also inspired by Dr. Brown, the anarchic mime/clown creation of Los Angeles-born performer Phil Burgers.
Doctor Brown is reinventing clowning and mime with a dark, unpredictable edge. Burgers’s physical comedy skills are impeccable, extracting laughs from simple, subtle movements, like a raise of an eyebrow, rather than big visual punchlines. Since seing Dr. Brown couple of years ago in the Fringe festival here in Brighton I have been interested in the absurd. I find inspiration in the absurd and in the tragycomedy of life. I love facial expressions, body languague and how we comunicate with our body without saying a word. It’s just fascinating.

This is a description (see below) about Theatre of the Absurd in Wikipedia which I love, but does human existence really has no meaning or purpose? I find this super interesting…

Theatre of the Absurd proposes that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.

And the biggest question; am I ready to act as a comedian in my practice? In flesh…?

Le passage du temps, 2013

This piece was amazing, it was painful to set it all up, each lampshade was hanging from the ceiling with fishing line, I didn’t have a plan about where to hang each lampshades, I just knew that I wanted to create like a big cloud of lamphsades. It felt great climbing the ladder and going between the lampshades, it was quite magical in a way, escaping…

I didn’t have a plan really so I have to leave it as experimental as it could be. It was the first time I was using a projector. I felt overwhelmed because I had to pay more consideration to what to project, what lights to use, what movements, what the ideas behind…

I found this video in youtube of Autumn leaves dancing in a field in a windy day. That day was in fact a windy but very bright and sunny day here in Brighton and on my way to university hundreds of brown and red leaves were dancing from left to right in front of my car. I found it so pretty, so poetical, it reminded me of how we come and go in life, death and life, recycling, cycles, how we move and how we grow, how time passes and how nature and landscape serves as a mirror for change. Overall I thought it was nostalgic. It reminded me of the past, the present and the future.

Ray (photography technician at university) and I were just amazed by the colours and the movement of the lampshades. The green of the field and the pink colours of the lampshades created beautiful lilac colours. We couldn’t stop looking at it. It was like looking at a kaledoiscope with pastel colours and forms. A fragmented story of passage of time, beauty and decay.

I enjoy this very much but I found difficult to plan or to try to plan a work like this. I’m used to working with improvisation, to arrange materials as I wonder around the studio, with composition and aesthetics in mind. Installation work needs a lot more of planning but I think the possibilites, the playfulness and especially the interaction with the viewer is worthy.

I thought maybe I could do something like this for my degree show. A dark room with all the lampshades hanging from the ceiling and with projections and movement and lights. Is the autumn leaves enough? Is there a connection with my ideas above? Are these vintage lampshades are symbol of passing time? Yes in a way isn’t? but does it really work?

I always like to try to challenge myself and make new work but maybe is also good to compromise and resolve pieces like this one.

My work has changed this year, I’m encouraged by my tutor to keep chaotic but with a mix of this new flare of elegant, subbtle work that I seem to produce a the moment. I think not sharing a studio with a lot of people has made a change in the way I work. I have to create the fun myslef, I have to build an ambience myself, a positive and energetic one, and actually keep it up, but it is diffcult when you are on your own. It is true that has a lot of benefits too but it is nice to work with people that really know you and they allow yourself to yourself, but that’s not a problem I think either with my classmates this year, they are used to seeing me smashing lampshades and making mess and making suddens movements when an idea comes to my mind.

But yes, the fun is kind of gone… Is MA a bit more serious with all this academic writing and things… Maybe a little bit.

I need to get a draft done for my dissertation for next Tuesday which I haven’t started it yet. I feel numbed these days. The fast approaching of degree show is very very very exciting but also quite scary. With these Easter’s breaks, my parents here for a week, my daughter off from school, me gardening and finding pleasure there, nurturing flowers and plants and my partner’s birthday tomorrow I feel like I can’t really settled in my mind, I can’t tuned with my mind, I am with my soul but not with my mind.

Now time for next post… today its going to be different.

Le passage du temps, 2013

In this work in progress, Arrivederci Roma, I attempt to work with an installation approach and to use tools that I have never used before to achieve an interactive outcome. These are fans to achieve movement, spot lights with red and blue gels to create depth and shadows, music and objects, in this case the lampshades.

I chose some 1950s music from YouTube. I was looking for music that had a nostalgic feel to it. I decided that the popular Italian song Arrivederci Roma by Renato Rascel could work well. Arrivederci (or a rivederci), which literally means “until we see each other again”, is a common Italian equivalent of “goodbye”. The original lyrics express the nostalgia of a Roman man for the dinners and short-lived love affairs he had with foreign tourists who came to Rome. It recalls the popular legend associated with the Trevi Fountain.

I wanted, somehow, to bring back the life of these lampshades and to imagine the lives of their previous owners. I flirted with the idea of creating a new relationship between them, unknown to each other and to me. I wanted to recreate tenderness, a caress to the soul and new memories.

But why to represent nostalgia right now? What means nostalgia? And why is it for?

As per Wikipedia, the term nostalgia describes a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. It is also said that reliving past memories may provide comfort and contribute to mental health. One notable recent medical study has looked at the physiological effects thinking about past ‘good’ memories can have. They found that thinking about the past ‘fondly’ actually increased perceptions of physical warmth.

Comfort, that’s interesting. Do I want to provide with some kind of mental comfort to the viewer in some of my work? And does this work provides comfort? Do I want to make comfortable the sometimes conflictive process of ageing by using nostalgia? To provide comfort to myself?

Synonims of nostalgia are: wistfulness, longing/yearning/pining for the past, regret, regretfulness, reminiscence, remembrance, recolletion, homesickness, sentimentatily.

I wanted to recreate a whimsical dance, something very intimate and sensual, something that could captivate the viewer sensorially. This is how I felt when setting up this installation, comfortable. There was a floaty feeling in the room, very intimitate and romantic. It remind me of the theathre with spotlights illuminating the dancers, the rest of the room was dark and you could imagine people watching them… This is interesting too since I have been interested in theatre this year specially the theatre of the absurd and also in the Triadic Ballet (1927) of German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer 1888–1943). This tells me that I’m starting to recognise other ways to express ideas or emotions, I’m opened up to other fields…

This was a 1st experiment and it needed to develop further. I took the lampshades to the photographic studio where I recreate kind of the same set up. Using fishing line this time instead of ugly wire, and projections of swing dancers and Autumn leaves in a field. (Next post)

I enjoyed this work very much, but I haven’t show it in crits as the installation in flesh, I have only shown videos of them. I would like to know if really triggers an emotional response from the viewer. I’m not sure if I’m comunicating well my ideas behind here but it was worth a try.

Arrivederci Roma (Work in progress), 2013

I’m going to try to catch up with all the work that I have done throughout the year, I need to quickly revised everything before I start writing my dissertation draft as I need to know better where my work stands at the moment.

What’s the difference between seeing these moving sculptures throughout video or seeing them in flesh, 3 dimensional, physical in the space? Do they become just a 2D moving image taking away many of the characteristics of each character? Do I need more of them, videos or the actual sculptures to create a bigger impact on the viewer? More chaos, more colera, more rage, more noise and then silence and sobs… kisses, laughing and then all starts again… chaos, rage, silence and sobs…

These two works are attempts to represent violence specially in a domestic environment. The monkey is meant to represent the monster inside of an abusive person, someone that appears different in social life and then behaves differently agressively indoors in the privacy of the household. The monkey shakes head and arms simulating the physical effects of rage in our body, when large amounts of adrenaline and oxygen in the bloodstream can cause a person’s extremities to shake. It is the juxtaposition of the toy and the knife which makes the work poignant and somehow obscure, drawing references from troubled chidhoods and the effect of domestic violence in children.

I’m considering using the monkey again for my degree show but it will depend on the technical side, I don’t think is very difficult and I already have some advice from experts. I won’t be using video though, but using a clear glass box, cloche or wooden house to represent entrapment. By using a sensor, the monkey only will be activated when someone walks away from it, reflecting on how aggressive people only harm their victimes when in privacy.

I feel like I have given up on the mechanical, movement interest with which I started this year, I have explored other ways such as using fans and performance but I should keep trying using motors, sensors, arduino. Perhaps completing the monkey for degree show is needed at this point, so I can feel like I have come back and tried once more time.

There is currently some monkeys in Toys r us which are bonkers, they shake heads and when placed together the effect is disturbing and confusing but also very humourous. They are hysterical and I can think of some ideas to do with them but is this the real deal? Where should I put my money, time and effort for degree show???

Monkeys in Toys r us. The real deal? Worth to experiment with them?