Monthly Archives for January 2010

Vision Quest: Neo-Shamanic Art in Brooklyn, NY, Jan 17th

vision

Show image: Jason Leinwand “Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It”

VISION QUEST – A Group Show of Neo-Shamanic Art
Opening:  Saturday, January 16th, 2010    7–10pm
On View:  January 17th–February 21st, 2010
Hours:  Thursdays & Fridays 3–6pm; Saturdays & Sundays 12–6pm

Brooklyn, NY –  OBSERVATORY and Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman are proud to kick off 2010 with VISION QUEST, a group show of neo-shamanic art, on view from January 16th through February 21st.

A healer, a medicine (wo)man, a guide:  the shaman is a figure who interfaces with nature magic and the invisible world at large, for the betterment of the tribe.  Fluent in the language of symbols, and a perennial student of plant wisdom, the shaman is also a translator – bringing back messages from a place veiled thick with leaves, bones, smoke, ghosts.

This journey to the other side – to the innerside – is not just a flowery promenade of song and trance; of friendly animal spirits and ancestral reunions.  For while this land is rife with vibrant, variegated beauty, it can also be a danger zone.  Images of decapitation and dismemberment abound – though ultimately act as portents for personal transformation and rebirth.  This shadowy terrain is trod only by those brave enough to encounter whatever may be found along the way, as each sojourn is mysterious, thoroughly unpredictable, and entirely individual.  However, the results of the trip often prove invaluable, as the traveler returns armed with knowledge that will in turn illuminate and repair the community, and fortify his or her own soul.

While the role of the shaman has traditionally been fulfilled by experienced elders in indigenous groups spanning culture and time, VISION QUEST posits that our artists fit the bill as well.  Today, with more of us living in an urban jungle rather than a real one, it has become all the more important to figure out ways to internalize the lessons of nature: its growth, its brilliant bloom, its death.  And in an age of digitization and distraction, of wire vines and humming screens, it’s no wonder we long for deeper, more sensory experiences of self – with all of its darkness and divinity.

As such, each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather.  Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jesse Bransford • William Crump • Scott Gursky • Juliet Jacobsen • Ashley Lande • Adela Leibowitz • Jason Leinwand • Christopher Mir • Joe Newton • Herbert Pfostl • Christopher Reiger • Christine Shields • Erika Somogyi • Jessie Rose Vala

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Pam Grossman is the creator and editor of Phantasmaphile, the premiere online destination for art aficionados with a passion for the surreal and the fantastical.  An internationally beloved art and culture web log, it features daily spotlights on artists and events, as well as interviews with such visual luminaries as Thomas Woodruff, Nils Karsten, and Richard A. Kirk.  Phantasmaphile was written up two years in a row on the Manhattan User’s Guide Top 400 New York Sites list, and Grossman’s previous show, “Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists,” was featured by myriad taste-making outlets including Juxtapoz, Arthur, Upper Playground, and Neil Gaiman’s Twitter page.  “VISION QUEST” is her latest curatorial effort, and she is proud to have it hanging at OBSERVATORY, the art and events space she co-founded.

ABOUT THE GALLERY
OBSERVATORY is an art and events space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  Founded in February 2009 and run by a group of seven artists and bloggers, the space seeks to present programming inspired by the 18th century notion of “rational amusement” and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature.  The space hosts screenings, lectures, classes, and exhibitions, and is part of the Proteus Gowanus art complex.  It is located at 543 Union Street (at Nevins), and is accessed through Proteus Gowanus Gallery’s entrance.  OBSERVATORY’s gallery hours are 3-6pm on Thursdays and Fridays; and 12-6pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

For press and media inquiries, please contact Pam Grossman:  phantasmaphile [at] gmail.com

Martha Colburn – "Join The Freedom Force"

“Casio Halbzeit” by Knalpot, directed by Martha Colburn from Floating World Comics on Vimeo.

Martha Colburn is a musician and filmmaker living in New York.  Through a collage of live action (paint-on-glass) animations, found footage and documentary filmmaking techniques, her films are a disturbing and at times humorous take on popular and political culture.

Among her dozens of short films she has also made videos for Deerhoof and Daniel Johnston.  Her latest video is for the Dutch band Knalpot and their song, Casio Halbzeit.  The film is hand made collage animation shot on 16mm.  “Animation is magical, it’s making gold out of glitter.”

"Embody your economies"

klehmhen

Probably Not Peaches
by Nance Klehm

I wrote the following last October—I’m sharing it now because in this new year, I feel there is an urgent call for us to get grounded in our actions and intentions…

My egg economy fell out on Monday. All of my quail and all but one of my chickens were killed by a predator with dexterous digits—one that can turn a latch and pry chicken wire away from an armature. (Probably a raccoon, not as rare as you might think in urban Chicago.) Their headless, half-eaten bodies were strewn about the garden. Prolly, aka P-N-P, aka Probably Not Peaches, my one remaining hen, is in a liminal state of health. She is hovering. I am sitting in my bathroom with her. She is breathing deeply, sitting on a bed of straw in a small cage with a dish of her favorite foods nearby: scrambled eggs with crushed egg shell, raisins and chickweed. This food has remained untouched.

I live with animals and plants. It is my practice and lifestyle to grow, forage preserve food, make medicine and build soil. This practice of mine is an economy in and of itself. It sustains me and I am also able to use it to create other economies that create other relationships with people and sometimes ones that pay the bills. I use aesthetic strategies to illuminate and frame this lifestyle. Curiously, the art world casts lines to my practice and I am offered exhibits and asked to perform. I engage this economy skeptically and try to identify the cracks that allow me to expand beyond it.

From the back of her comb to her shoulder blades, Prolly has been scalped. I am surprised she is alive and holding onto this compromised state of being, but animals are like that: they continue to persist even when they’ve been knocked down a notch or four. I rub honey with finely chopped yarrow into her rawness. I hold her in my lap and loop energy through my heart, into my left arm, through her, into my other arm and then into my heart again. And I keep looping this circuit. It occurs to me that I am allowing myself to be increasingly late to my own art opening.

If Prolly could think abstractly, and who’s to say chickens don’t, what would she say about ‘economy’? The word ‘economic’ directly follows ‘ecology’ in many dictionaries. In mine, the Oxford Pocket American Dictionary of Current English reads:

ecology / economic / economical / economics / economist / economize, economy / ecosphere / ecosystem

All these ‘eco-‘ words framed between the unlikely bookends of the bacteria ‘e.coli’ and the color ‘ecru’ come from the Greek oikos meaning “home.”

“Ecology” is about the quality of relationship of a community of organisms and economy is about the wealth and management of resources of a community. Ecology is a self-perpetuating economy. There is a cyclical give and take and give once again. I am a homesteader. I follow these cycles.

Prolly breathes long and heavy. I take advantage of this and drip watery eye droppers full of blended chicken soup, molasses and bee pollen into her beak. She drinks each dose and then suddenly flails herself from my lap.

So I go to my art opening late. I mill about distractedly. I am taken to a boozy dinner with the curator. I do my best not to growl. I get home at midnight and sit in the straw and drip feed my chicken until we both nod off.

***

After five days, Probably Not Peaches let go. When I returned home, I paused at the door and asked her if she was there. And she said “no.” And she wasn’t. That night I gently planted her to feed the witch hazel.

Prolly was in pain, but I didn’t kill her. I wanted to care for her after the trauma and in caring for her, I entered her time completely and our communication was clear.

I am feeling immensely hopeful that some of us are already engaged at that clear, belly-churning level, and others are reaching for it. The Earth has shifted on its axis and the light is coming back to the northern hemisphere. It’s time to drop deeper into our particular places and get busy. So I leave you with this distillation:

Situate yourself sensually.
Contribute to your inhabitation.
Embody your economies.

Can you feel it?
Ground down.

Fri, Jan 8, Portland, Oregon: CLOWNS WITHOUT BORDERS Chiapas Benefit

The invite:

Join volunteers and friends of Clowns Without Borders for an evening of laughter, wonder and amusement as we bring our dreams (and maybe yours) to life. At this event, we ask the question: how do we live our dreams? And how can we inspire each other to dream? Join us for a night of fantasy and amazement featuring world-class performers from Portland and abroad.

Clowns Without borders offers laughter and enchantment to relieve the suffering of all
persons, especially children, who live in areas of crisis; including refugee camps, conflict zones, and territories in situations of emergency around the world. This event benefits Clowns Without Borders USA for the upcoming trip to Chiapas, Mexico and this year will mark the 7th year of touring in Chiapas. For the first three weeks in February several clowns will be traveling to Zapatista schools and villages to bring performance, laughter and merriment to all we encounter. Other projects of Clowns without borders include Haiti, Southern Sudan, Kenya, Southern Africa, Colombia, India, Mexico, Ethiopia, Guatemala and around the domestic USA.

Clowns Without Borders needs your support, so pull out your wallets, dig into your pockets, search the sofa cushions… whatever it takes! With the help of many energetic volunteers, generous sponsors and the beautiful space at the Bamboo Grove Salon, we’ll provide the party.

We invite you to arrive in costume and bring your dreams to life, in the company of aerial artists, stilt walkers, jugglers, physical theatre performers, and more…

The event is 21+, Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm.
The Bamboo Grove is a mixed use art, performance, and practice space dedicated to the connection between asian and american arts. They have over 3500 feet of space available for meetings, workshops, film viewings, parties and events. see our rental space page for details.

134 SE Taylor St. Portland, OR 97214 (entrance on 2nd street between taylor and salmon) – www.bamboogrovesalon.com

'NURSE NURSE 4' by Katie Skelly (pt. 3/3)

Katie Skelly lives in New York City.  She works full time and is working on an art history M.A. so she does comics whenever she has spare time. Sparkplug distributes the Nurse Nurse series, and she hopes to have the fifth issue out very soon. Her website is calicocomics.com.  Arthur is pleased to present issue 4 of Nurse Nurse, which we’ll serialize in 3 parts.  Here’s pt. 1 and pt. 2.

Previously:  In issues 1-3, interplanetary nurse Gemma is sent to space to help heal atmosphere-poisoned colonists on Venus. She’s attacked by a butterfly farmer who experiments in aphrodisiacs and steals a top secret book, which gets her demoted to a mission on Mars. On the way to Mars, two space pirates, Bandit and Pandaface, hijack her ship and loot it for parts. Gemma discovers a way to escape the pirates but it lands her on a familiar adversary’s ship.

Continue reading →

Plants of the Tundra


Above: Moss-covered ice mound in the Alaskan tundra, formed by the ground’s constant vacillation between freezing and thawing.

The “tundra” (from the Finnish word tunturi, meaning “treeless heights”) is otherwise known as that ribbon of latitude on our planet where the landscape shifts from tall trees and flowering bushes to comparatively shrimpy shrubs and frost-covered blankets of moss, brightly colored lichens, and delicate tufts of sedge (or “Arctic grass.”) The top layer of vegetation only thaws and grows for a few months a year, revealing to us a mysterious web of plant life beneath the ice…


Above: Reindeer lichen, an extremely cold-hardy plant most commonly found in the Arctic tundra. The Dena’ina people (native to Alaska) are known to eat this plant (boiled until soft) in dishes with berries, fish, eggs, or lard, and drink its juices to treat a number of physical ailments.


Above: Yellow lichens on a frost-covered Arctic floor, otherwise known in Inuit culture as “Excrement of the Sun.” Scientists have recently discovered anti-tumor, anti-microbial and anti-viral properties in compounds made from lichens.


Above: An Arctic fox takes a nap within the willows. Young Arctic willow leaves contain up to 10 times more vitamin C than an orange, and the bark can be boiled to make a pain-relieving tea.


Above: Last but not least, the Fly-Agaric. This mushroom is found in many areas of the world including scattered about the Alaskan tundra and the Arctic region of Kamchatka (a peninsula in the Russian Far East).

The Koryak people of Kamchatka are known to gather Fly-Agaric mushrooms growing in the roots of sacred birch trees and eat them (either dried or soaked in blueberry juice) as a means of enhancing creative and physical energy (i.e. to “play music all night long,”) among other spiritual and ceremonial purposes. Reindeer also love to eat this mushroom, and are said to act “drunken” under its influence.

Read more about the Koryaks’ use of the Fly-Agaric in the essay “IS THE FLY-AGARIC (AMANITA MUSCARIA) AN EFFECTIVE MEDICINAL MUSHROOM?” by Gary Lincoff.