In the meantime, here's a little outtake, a photo I took while shooting the Brutalist 1968 addition to the Second Baptist Church in Greektown. It doesn't really fit the piece but I like it for other reasons:
Monday, May 23, 2016
Second Baptist addition
I'm in the midst of working on my next contribution to Infinite Mile, a photo essay documenting 30 modernist churches in Detroit. This project has pretty much consumed my free time these last couple weeks, and as much as I'm enjoying working on it, I'll be happy to turn it in this week.
In the meantime, here's a little outtake, a photo I took while shooting the Brutalist 1968 addition to the Second Baptist Church in Greektown. It doesn't really fit the piece but I like it for other reasons:
In the meantime, here's a little outtake, a photo I took while shooting the Brutalist 1968 addition to the Second Baptist Church in Greektown. It doesn't really fit the piece but I like it for other reasons:
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Essay'd in print!
The four of us behind Essay'd have been working our tails off getting the thing ready for print these last few months. We're all so excited to see this work take shape this way, escaping the confines of the web and finding its way (we hope) to bookshelves everywhere!
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| Baby's first page proof. The final product will be in full, glorious color! |
You can take a closer look and pre-order a copy of the book over at WSU Press's site.
In the meantime, the Essay'd project continues over at Essayd.org, where new essays continue to roll out. (We're well on our way to #60, so with any luck, Essay'd, vol 2 won't be far behind!)
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Liza B at Play House
I'm working on a piece for Model D about The Hinterlands, a Detroit-based experimental performance group that I just can't get enough of.
I went and took some photos of them and their space to illustrate the piece the other day. I didn't think this particular photo was good for the article but I wanted to share it anyway. It depicts Hinterlands co-founder Liza Bielby on the set of their new production The Radicalization Process, inside their performance space, a once-vacant house transformed by Power House Productions.
I went and took some photos of them and their space to illustrate the piece the other day. I didn't think this particular photo was good for the article but I wanted to share it anyway. It depicts Hinterlands co-founder Liza Bielby on the set of their new production The Radicalization Process, inside their performance space, a once-vacant house transformed by Power House Productions.
Monday, April 11, 2016
Curtain Call
I was really struck by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson's Woman in E, a performance installation that was on view at Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art from January 15 to April 10.
Formally, Woman in E is pretty straightforward, minimal, even. The two entrances to MOCAD's main gallery are obscured by curtains of gold tinsel that reach to the floor. Part a curtain, step through, and enter an expansive oval room, defined by an uninterrupted wall of tinsel. In the center is a rotating platform, upon which you'll find an amp and a woman in a glittering gold dress and gold high heel shoes. She is standing or sitting on the amp, strumming a gold and white electric guitar. She strums an E flat chord, over and over again. Sometimes she riffs. She looks over your head or down at the guitar, or else she closes her eyes. Occasionally she might glance at you, ever so briefly, but you get the impression she's not supposed to. The platform rotates slowly. The tinsel dazzles in the light. Stay as long as you want; she's here whenever the museum is open for visitors. "She" is actually seven different women, local musicians who work in three hour shifts.
I don't want to spend a lot of time reading the piece here, because this is all really intended to be a prologue to some photos I'd like to share, but of course there is a lot to be said about it. It's a complex work about objectification and music, cinema and presence, glamour and artifice. It's about art history's long line of singular, sorrowful women, and about women's long history of being looked at. It's about you and the performer, being in the room together. It's about conceptions of beauty. And all of its meaning comes by way of this experience: Woman in E is alive, multi-sensory, enveloping. It's art you become part of, gently but powerfully. I went to experience it three different times, twice in February and again last Saturday. On my second visit, I went alone in the middle of the day and sat on the floor for a while, just sort of giving myself over to the piece: its resonant sounds, the beautiful visual counterpoint of the slow rotation and the fast-dancing light, the exquisite tension of looking, really just sitting and looking, wordless, at another human being. A stranger. A woman.
Part of the pleasure of repeat visits is the variability of the performers. I saw a different woman each time I visited. Each time I felt moved to take her picture. (This is the kind of work that invites you to photograph it, but also makes you feel a little uncertain about whether or not you really should. That's a person up there, after all, who didn't exactly give you her permission to be photographed; yet there she is, no doubt being photographed all day, no doubt having signed something saying she was cool with it.) I shot the first two with my phone:
Last Saturday, I went back to MOCAD to write at the cafe there, and I brought my proper camera, knowing that Woman in E was closing the next day. I worked for a couple hours, listening to the E flat chord emanating from the next room, savoring it, telling myself I shouldn't go in until I'd done a couple solid hours of writing.
Eventually, ready, I picked up the camera, parted the streamers, and walked in. This woman (her name, I learned from Instagram, is Deekah Wyatt), was evidently just starting her shift, or returning from a break. She was being led across the gallery and up the stairs of the platform by a MOCAD employee, and she was crying. I learned later that she was crying because it was her last shift, her last time playing the Woman in E, but I intuited that before I knew it. Deekah Wyatt was really feeling it, feeling something (who knows what, after so many hours of doing this over three months?), and her unexpected outpouring changed the piece, deepening its beauty and raising the stakes of our interaction. Her tears subsided after a few minutes, but her emotion hung in the room, stayed preserved in her body. For a long time, it was just the two of us, and it was all so personal. I felt in our moments together that I was equal parts witness and intruder. That ambivalence about taking pictures reached new heights, and it took a few minutes before I felt comfortable turning on the camera. (I don't, in fact, ever recall feeling so acutely that the taking of a photograph is a rapacious act. Yes, you take a picture). But I did turn it on, and in the end, I'm glad I did.
Here are my favorite shots from that afternoon:
Formally, Woman in E is pretty straightforward, minimal, even. The two entrances to MOCAD's main gallery are obscured by curtains of gold tinsel that reach to the floor. Part a curtain, step through, and enter an expansive oval room, defined by an uninterrupted wall of tinsel. In the center is a rotating platform, upon which you'll find an amp and a woman in a glittering gold dress and gold high heel shoes. She is standing or sitting on the amp, strumming a gold and white electric guitar. She strums an E flat chord, over and over again. Sometimes she riffs. She looks over your head or down at the guitar, or else she closes her eyes. Occasionally she might glance at you, ever so briefly, but you get the impression she's not supposed to. The platform rotates slowly. The tinsel dazzles in the light. Stay as long as you want; she's here whenever the museum is open for visitors. "She" is actually seven different women, local musicians who work in three hour shifts.
I don't want to spend a lot of time reading the piece here, because this is all really intended to be a prologue to some photos I'd like to share, but of course there is a lot to be said about it. It's a complex work about objectification and music, cinema and presence, glamour and artifice. It's about art history's long line of singular, sorrowful women, and about women's long history of being looked at. It's about you and the performer, being in the room together. It's about conceptions of beauty. And all of its meaning comes by way of this experience: Woman in E is alive, multi-sensory, enveloping. It's art you become part of, gently but powerfully. I went to experience it three different times, twice in February and again last Saturday. On my second visit, I went alone in the middle of the day and sat on the floor for a while, just sort of giving myself over to the piece: its resonant sounds, the beautiful visual counterpoint of the slow rotation and the fast-dancing light, the exquisite tension of looking, really just sitting and looking, wordless, at another human being. A stranger. A woman.
Part of the pleasure of repeat visits is the variability of the performers. I saw a different woman each time I visited. Each time I felt moved to take her picture. (This is the kind of work that invites you to photograph it, but also makes you feel a little uncertain about whether or not you really should. That's a person up there, after all, who didn't exactly give you her permission to be photographed; yet there she is, no doubt being photographed all day, no doubt having signed something saying she was cool with it.) I shot the first two with my phone:
Last Saturday, I went back to MOCAD to write at the cafe there, and I brought my proper camera, knowing that Woman in E was closing the next day. I worked for a couple hours, listening to the E flat chord emanating from the next room, savoring it, telling myself I shouldn't go in until I'd done a couple solid hours of writing.
Eventually, ready, I picked up the camera, parted the streamers, and walked in. This woman (her name, I learned from Instagram, is Deekah Wyatt), was evidently just starting her shift, or returning from a break. She was being led across the gallery and up the stairs of the platform by a MOCAD employee, and she was crying. I learned later that she was crying because it was her last shift, her last time playing the Woman in E, but I intuited that before I knew it. Deekah Wyatt was really feeling it, feeling something (who knows what, after so many hours of doing this over three months?), and her unexpected outpouring changed the piece, deepening its beauty and raising the stakes of our interaction. Her tears subsided after a few minutes, but her emotion hung in the room, stayed preserved in her body. For a long time, it was just the two of us, and it was all so personal. I felt in our moments together that I was equal parts witness and intruder. That ambivalence about taking pictures reached new heights, and it took a few minutes before I felt comfortable turning on the camera. (I don't, in fact, ever recall feeling so acutely that the taking of a photograph is a rapacious act. Yes, you take a picture). But I did turn it on, and in the end, I'm glad I did.
Here are my favorite shots from that afternoon:
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Leap Night!
Last week I hosted LEAP NIGHT, a screening of seven short dance-for-camera films at Play House in Detroit. Play House, developed by Power House Productions, is the home of experimental performance group The Hinterlands, who invited me to curate a selection of historic dance films. (Well, six are historic, and one is a more recent, local production.)
It was so great. Great turn out (about 30 people showed up, just enough to fill the room), great energy, great opportunity. My pal Sarah Rose Sharp published a really nice write-up about it in KnightArts.
As I was preparing the program, I couldn't shake the feeling that I ought to write something about what I was showing, hence the following notes, comprised of a brief paragraph about each film, as well as a collage by the one and only Michel Francois Soucisse!
(click images to enlarge)
(If you haven't seen any of the films, they're all available to watch for free somewhere online, whether Youtube, Vimeo, or Ubuweb.)
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