Intersection: Night documentation and conversation with Matt McGarvey

Intersection/Night, live performance July 13th, 2024, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Gretchen and Hyperbolic Q with the tapestry paintings.

Intersection is a site-specific project dedicated to exploring the interconnectivity of painting, sound, dance, and film. The goal is to construct a non-hierarchical entwinement of these traditionally separate mediums. The entwinement prioritizes sensation, embodiment, and synesthesia. The artists rely on improvisation, play, and dialoguing, and the let’s-say-“tactile” intertwining of one’s physical being with the spatio-temporal fabric in which one exists.

Intersection/ Night, a live performance at Night gallery took place on July 13, 2024. I created an installation of tapestry paintings in the outdoor courtyard of Night gallery in Los Angeles and invited Silvi Naci, Friidom Dunn, Hyperbolic Q and Gretchen Ackerman to interact with the paintings as they swayed in the wind. The main instruction was to treat the paintings as somatic maps and respond to their visual cues while immersed in the sonic environment created and performed live by Matt McGarvey. I gave each performer specific suggestions as to where within the installation to focus on and how to slow down their attention and response. McGarvey played in real time improvising over a base track featuring samples of bells, crows, snakes, and wind. The performance took 33 min. 

Documentation filmed by Iva Gueorguieva, Neven McGarvey and Victoria Aravindhan

Conversation about this ongoing project  with Matt McGarvey, July 2024-present

PART I:

Iva: 

We have been talking, listening, looking and reading for 25 years. Our first connection was philosophy and I still remember sitting across from you at a bar in Philly talking passionately and extremely fast about perception or maybe it was about phenomenology or Foucault or … 

We had a band in Philly called “Did you know Benjamin Franklin invented electricity,” a band that only happened late at night with our friends picking up whatever instruments laid around in your music studio (a bedroom in our house in Germantown on the edge of Fairmount park in Philly) and me making up nonsense lyrics about suicidal owls and singing them in my rather tone deaf manner. 

Our first serious collaboration was the giant collage I made in 2008 with speakers that played sounds you composed. When Neven was 5 months old we had a show in Amsterdam that featured my giant double-sided collages on mulberry paper, projections of stop-action animations based on my ink drawings and your immersive ambient compositions. For my show at Angles Gallery in 2009 we created an immersive sound installation with multiple projections on massive mulberry paper collages. We are now three years into developing the ongoing experimental project Intersection.

Sprawl, 2007, mixed media on mulberry paper with audio speakers, 140” x 90” x 50”W, installation at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Can you talk about how you see the juxtaposition of sound and painting? What would you say are some key principles that guide our experiments? What do you think has changed or evolved in our approach?

Matt:

I guess all this time we’ve been looking for an answer like that, and not necessarily finding it, but still feeling somehow that the answer is there. I feel like those earlier pieces pose the question and now maybe we’re closer to answers. So with the Angles installation, the sound was all around and in that way it contextualized and situated the visual work. The viewer is IN the sound, looking AT the image. 

There’s also a contrast between the sound and the video, which are one-way durational, versus the tapestries and paintings, which of course endure, but don’t just lay themselves out from beginning to end in a timeline and then start over. Part of the relation here is between “time-based” media which start at one point and end in another, and painting, which exists in time but is dependent on the motion and cognition of the viewer and does not start and end in the same way.

Installation view, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, 2009

So now with the intersections I think we’re closer to the real relation of sound and painting, but we’ve also introduced a third, volatile element, namely the motion of dancers. So we think about the way that a sonic gesture relates to a bodily gesture, and how those relate to “gestures” on a canvas, or even gestures OF a canvas, since your tapestries are moveable. One thing I think we’ve gotten to, or I have anyway in my thinking, is a vocabulary of “submodal” terms–that is, terms that are not specific to any one perceptual “modality” like seeing or hearing or touch. “Gesture” is a submodal phenomenon. There are gestures in painting, in music, in dance. Similarly there is “rhythm” in each, there’s “tension,” there’s “sequence,” “contrast,” “form”... Maybe all those art-theoretical or aesthetic terms which relate to how we both organize and understand a piece of art… all or most point at things that are general, not specific to seeing or hearing. 

But to simplify: how do sound and painting relate. Remember the other day you asked me what my sound practice had to do with the going-out-to-the-edge art theory classes, the ones focused on “land art” and “outsider art” where we’d go way out in the desert and look at petroglyphs and then a solar farm and then Purifoy’s art… What does sound-making have to do with those spaces? And my answer after a pause was I think it has to do with bodily comportment and attentiveness. I mean, the way my body opens out to a big desert space, answering the wind, feeling a broad open bigness… or in another instance, say nestled in the rippling skirts of the mountain as it canyons to the valley… feeling that rockness, the cool, the falling rivulets of water, the motion of leaves… This being-with-space… that’s the same way I feel when listening/playing.

There’ something related there about space. Like, sound GIVES a space in which painting can exist, differently. Like how sound gives a certain nook, a certain durability, a certain way of enduring, to a dancer’s gesture… it does just the same for a region of a painting. The tense, emotive, rhythmic, sonic filling of time… produces a time in which image-appearances work differently. 

Another clear thing is that music changes attentive selection. Probably image changes audial attention too. You know you can put music to just about any image and it will do SOMETHING to the apprehension of that image. It will fully change the nature of one’s seeing and comprehension. Put sound with the perception of painting, which comes about through a kind of unconscious rhythmic scansion… and the perception will now be different. Sound is really, I don’t know, I want to say “slutty”... about what and who it interacts with. And maybe it works the other way around too… since you’re hearing this sound in this visual context, it sounds different, and different elements become apparent and central than would do otherwise. So sound and image delimit and select for one another. 

But still, as usual, somehow the answer is incomplete. Sound and painting. They’re different but they’re not different. Everybody knows they’re different, but fewer people understand that they are not different. For example, you and I have talked a lot about the SOUND of your paintings. And I don’t mean when they fall, or are dragged, or when my sound is around… We mean a kind of silent sound. Talking about how your paintings sound is a way of getting at something they’re doing dynamically, emotionally, compositionally, texturally… that is hard to get at with a visual or semantic language. Certain compositions are loud, tinkly, ominous, reverberating or conversely hushed, whispering, like sectors of silk in a skirt swishing. “Sound” here doesn’t literally mean vibratory energy in the air… it refers to a kind of fringe of visuality… an overlap between visuality and music, where the emphasis is certainly no longer on the presence of objects to vision or the reading of various visual aspects into a meaning… but rather on the way that a composition is still DOING itself, doing its thing, its composition, on the painting, or in the room where it’s seen. Certain of your paintings SOUND different ways meaning that they emote or drone or chatter at certain rates, in different clusters. Anyway, there IS a meaningful way to talk about the “sonic” dimensions of your work, and it’s not truly even metaphorical.

And of course one thing that really interests me is how my sound can give rise to so many images in hearers. It’s suggestive and makes people picture certain things.That’s arbitrary to some degree, just the individual imagining of the listener, but on the other hand clearly the sound constrains that imagining, or stimulates it in certain ways. So your painting, or the various visual time-based media we’ve made, they fill in a space that the sound opens… a space of the possibility of the dramatic image, an image that is somehow laden or saturated with feeling. Sound arouses that feeling; the visual can capture it or allow it to be projected. 

Somehow none of these answers are sufficient, or they don’t quite get to the thing. But that’s what I think we’re working on. 

Iva:

You hit on many significant points and clusters of questions that form the subterranean level of our collective understanding. We both feel and lean into certain intellectual traditions like phenomenology or Walter Benjamin’s practice of thinking and writing, as well as radical artistic practices like Gutai, Butoh, Dada, and even CoBra. What I am trying to say is that there is a rich precedent for what we are doing and yet, I feel like I am moving down a path one step at a time with a thick fog in front of me. There is something about this project that beckons me and seduces me over and over. I think there is something about the practice of setting up a situation and then stepping back to observe the consequences as they unfold. It’s all a bit alchemical. But alchemy to me is about “intimacy.” It’s the closest to getting one's nose to the mystery of elemental collaborations, like the way hydrogen molecules instantly bond with one another and then you have waterfalls. There is something about “intimacy” and momentary “bondings” that attracts and seduces me. I have noticed that once a dancer interacts with a painting that painting attaches herself to them. It resists being with another. It’s as though the “intimacy” of the encounter has changed the quality of the paintings “belonging.” It’s in a relationship and therefore even more removed from some sort of realm of non-sentient matter (muslin and paint).

Can you unpack this cluster of thoughts a bit?

Intersection/Night, live performance July 13th, 2024, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Friidom and Gretchen Ackerman.

Matt:

Well, I can unpack it a little but there’s a lot there, and I’m probably going to make the jumble worse. 

Just to begin, yes we’ve recently been seeing again how Walter Benjamin relates here: “reception in distraction” of architecture and perhaps sound–that is, peripheral and FELT awareness, versus focal objects for normative subjects; the “aura” as “the apparition of a distance, no matter how close…”; the angel of history and the piles of destruction at her feet. And yes there’s a connection to those art movements, though I’m not positive about Gutai. Dada, yes, in its refusal of canon and manners and its love of the pre- and post-meaningful. For me, also the Situationists… with the critique of the spectacle which isolates and pacifies and a demand for an active construction of situations which pull together and activate. But most of all Butoh: the dismantling of the human body as human and its resurrection from death as this that and the other, animal, cadaver, demon. A bodily practice so deeply immersed in proprioception, and playing so violently with the forms we as living bodies are ushered into by our institutions. Am I “human”? What if I melt? What if I skitter like a spider? What if I’m already dead? There have got to be manners of being which are not human… and we need these, demand these, seek and collapse into these… because “human” is an artificial container we are much better off outside of. Butoh like Augusto Boal and his Theater of the Oppressed, and like John B. Watson’s and B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism… see how the human body is “mechanized,” put to work, set up within limits for external manipulative purposes. Throw in late Freud and Marcuse and Foucault (and Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman) and you could say that the body is a mode in a system of repression, and itself a network of historical repressions… it’s a target in a social war which seizes it and exploits it. So then the liberatory option is to DE-mechanize. In the Theater of the Oppressed these are games that make the body move, together with other bodies, in ways that are not “functional.” Similarly for Butoh, the body is a set of material possibilities and a zone in which changes and feelings and desires pass and collide… but it can only be realized AS this sort of open domain, continuous with the environment… if and when I as an identity, as a 50 year old set of habits, ME as something YOU can recognize… is challenged and assassinated. Out from under the assassinated self glides a tide of vital serpents.

“I feel like I am moving down a path one step at a time with a thick fog in front of me.” Well yeah, duh, isn’t that life? Isn’t the fog the future? (And aren’t we afraid when it clears it’ll be fascism)? You know after both our recent performances people said a similar thing to me. Like this past one some of your painter friends said: “it’s so present, so present-day, it’s all about now.” Oh yeah it is. All this stuff is a scream of now, in the fog of war which is now. At Wonzimer at the end of the piece when Gretchen was on the floor they were expressing just exactly what I felt with that portion of the music. I never told them or you but that portion of the sound–I was thinking about nuclear war. What would those last seconds be and feel as the shockwaves come at your face? Gretchen channeled the same thing, and looking at them I knew I was looking at Gaza. Gretchen was on the ground in Gaza. None of this that we’re doing is “aesthetic” in the schoolish sense. It’s full-on political, just not in the bureaucratic party and policy sense. It’s political in the really-looking-at and really-feeling the real, fucked-up, heating, militarizing, post-neoliberal war-world, which is passing through all our bodies right now. Actually you know I think everybody lives with this pain, compromise, sickly evil participation, this fear, the nukes, the police, the surveillance, the utter vacuity, a “democratic” world far more totalitarian than anything called totalitarian before, the dehumanization of varying collections of bodies, the plastic particulate pulsating through all our veins… people feel it, and I really think it’s this pressure within us all that propels the stupidity, the blindness, the paralysis of critical capacity, the love of Disney and Instagram. 

Back to what is desirable and good and felt and alive. What we are intuiting and following here… You talk about “alchemy,” “intimacy,” “momentary bondings.” Yeah that all makes immediate sense to me. It’s the Unthem practice too. You do one or another level of preparation, from just setting up a situation, to identifying one or many intentions, you pull the people together and you try out the spell, and you see what happens. In that working-through, that intuiting and feeling-along, all the while watching as if from a distance, there’s a kind of gap. A gap between what is known and recognized, like a “gallery” and a “performance” and some “music”... and what WILL be… a comprehension, a reception, or a misapprehension, a failure to be known… BETWEEN the intending and the receiving, there’s the moving. And here’s the mystery: NOBODY KNOWS WHAT MOVING IS. In a world wrongly pinned down under nouns, nobody knows what a verb is. In a world full of objects and commodities, no language adequately allows for process. Or rather, there’s a general ignorance that IN PROCESS WE ARE NOT “WHO WE ARE” but something different, something ambient and environmental, spacious but exposed and vulnerable. You and I both live in that broken gap, that distance and difference… that crack from which “creativity” comes. We’re not “creators,” there are no “geniuses,” there’s just a few honest queerish folks who would rather be after what was intended and before what was grasped… “humans” who are way more comfortable being spiders. 

Intersection/Night, live performance July 13th, 2024, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Friidom and Hyperbolic Q.

“Intimacy.” Yeah, it’s true, though I still haven’t had a proper conversation with Gretchen, still, when they’re living through a kind of subhuman, submodal current that has traversed me also… down there in the toxic itching grit which literally coats the exhibition space… we have something in common which is a kind of secret that most people apparently do not experience… or better, something common HAS US. Not having, but being dispossessed, giving way, stepping aside, utterly collapsing… being run through by something nobody believes is real and yet which animates them too, though they don’t know it… this is a very intimate space to share. We are together in the aching truth shadowed by dull-blind stares.

“Bondings.” I think maybe you mean how some stuff hangs together and some doesn’t… how some gestures, on a surface, as elastic compression waves in the air, as limbs in relation… just dissipate, aren’t the thing, don’t move anybody… while others REALLY ARE SOMETHING… really hang together, they sustain, they won’t leave your memory, they ADHERE, in some kind of complex composite. That’s what we’re watching from our position as patient moving spiders, that’s what our weaving work is making way for. Our babies! The moments that shine. The conjunctures that CAN… We just set up a situation to let these baubles be born. Baubles or beings from elsewhere, from the gap, the cleft, the crack… beings whom we need… these very mundane deities, these sub-objective angels and demons… Anyway, somehow I insist, though nobody would believe it, that we are so deeply entangling with the REAL world, a world real as hell and realer by far than its objects… and yet also opening doorways to radical otherness… a face-seering otherness which may make us wild, bestial, but which is also healing. Perhaps healing because TRUE, in a processual sense, true in the sense of eventful and transformative (Badiou)... a TRUE emergence which is the only anti-nausea for a worldwide system of self-deceived terrified enactors of locked, deadly fictions…

Gretchen Ackerman with “Trembling Sun” in Elysian Park, LA, 2023

Painting, music, dance, installation, performance. These are categories. You get grants by applying as one or the other but not all. You get known as an artist by being one or the other but not all. They’re reifications. They reduce a continuum or a mixture to a list of self-identical things, to nouns. They make it seem like they’re things that are already known. They assume so much! Similarly the separation of the perceptual modalities. You have eyes, ears, hands… they must be like little managers in little high-rise offices, each doing their own little job. The eyes seeing, the ears hearing, the hands touching. So obvious! Althusser said whenever you find something “obvious,” beware, here is ideology. This sense of “obviousness” is the mark of cultural hegemony. It’s NOT so clear, really, in the sense that there could be no doubt and that there is no question… rather, when we feel “obvious” what we’re really feeling is social domination. Everybody has been trained up for just these obviousnesses and if we diverge it is as if they all condemn us. But hegemony and the obvious just hide things. We’re not after the obvious, we’re refusing it. What’s real is here and now and moving, and sick and sleek and ominous and ecstatic… and that intimate reality–it’s us; we’re (in) it–is also the primary mystery. I refuse to settle for a dead obvious world.

Iva:

You created very lucid cul-de-sacs where I can hang out and allow the language, the words to actually name without reducing. I just returned from Spain. After the Intersection performance at Night Gallery I left for Spain on a “gathering” journey. I saw the 40,000 year old prehistoric paintings in the caves of Cantambria and Picasso’s Guernica, a painting I have been thinking about and responding to for decades. I took photos of relief sculptures worn out by weather and time, screaming gargoyles perched on 11th century facades, graffiti and sleeping cats. What I was intensely aware of is how alert and alive I felt, a feeling identical to the feeling I have when I am filming the performances. We have been talking about the difference between the live performances with audience present and the performances like the ones we did in Elysian park with Friidom and Gretchen where my filming is all of the witnessing and the recording. What happens in the latter case is another kind of “sinking” in between the dancer, the painting, the sound and the camera, which is an extension of my body. It feels and looks different and we’re both interested in pursuing this distinction by creating a film. Can you lay out some of the conceptual, political and emotive differences? My feeling is that the dancing “body” in the case of a live performance amidst the unruly bodies of the audience, and the dancing “body” in relationship just to my filming body holding the camera… changes. What gets lost or rather what do you think becomes more or less legible? Why do we want to pursue a film? Will we find something different this way?

Matt:

Well I guess the first thing is that both dancing body and filming body are in different environments in the two different cases. The environment is what changes them. Maybe that’s obvious, but our idea, I think, is that the individual barely exists, except maybe as a reaction and a kind of refusal. Instead, individuals are always in a field, and especially in this opening-out practice, they’re always opening to the immediate material field. The world passes through us, constitutes us. So this field is very different when there are fifty or a hundred spectators, versus when you and I are the only ones, or even only you with a recording of my sound. I’m not a dancer but I can’t imagine that a dancing body feels the same laden with two hundred eyes as when it moves only for the sky or the wind, or two eyes. And then the same is true for you moving with the camera: you’re not in the same world when there’s an audience, you’re in an audience-world. The gazes and expectations are passing through you, modulating your body. Maybe more energized, maybe more anxious, you move differently, you shoot differently. And you see differently. I also imagine there’s a complex game of mirroring guesses regarding interpretation and meaning. I act differently when I talk to you than when I talk to my classes. When I talk to forty people in a room, I have to be aware what they are likely to think, how people typically take certain phrases or ideas, what people generally say. Isn’t that the same for seeing? I mean, the dancer must have some thoughts, whether they want to or not, about the thoughts of those who watch. Probably part of an adept mover is the ability to process and bend such an awareness. You think not only of what you mean to express, or how a motion feels, but also of what it looks like from outside and what the moving image is likely to evoke. Again, same for shooting with the camera: the audience is seeing you move, you’re a low-risk dancer (they’re mostly looking at the others), so their presence and gazes must modulate to some degree what you do. Even their simple physical presence limits the space in which you can move, and you don’t want to get in the way of them seeing either. Then also as you frame and follow, that mirroring game of guesses is there in thinking what you are seeing, what they are likely to see. This would be true for shoots with just you too, but the pressure of the thoughts of the others I imagine might be less. Perhaps it’s true when you paint too… other eyes are a possibility you are planning for, but they can wait. In the absence of the crowd, things are quieter, it’s easier to focus. It’s more like working in your studio. When you and the dancer/s are in a personal exchange, it’s something more intimate, with more pause and more gentle and more waiting. It’s quiet and I bet your looking is calmer, more focused. 

Then there’s the question about what the “art” is. What is the thing? Is it the painting, the photo still, the video, or the performance? With the audience there, the thing is the performance. We’ve been trying to do some kind of mesmerization, trying to destabilize the hard categories and hard thoughtless glances people wield even without meaning to, trying to un-separate hearing and feeling and seeing, to re-mobilize what gets locked and static… but all this is still inside this container-thing, “the performance.” It’s something to play with and something to push against. But really it’s just a way station, a watering hole we’re passing through. Remember Bruce Chatwin and Craig Childs both talk about songlines and map lines, drawn so as to pass through water holes. The studio is one fertile hole; maybe the performance is another. A place where a few lines meet and something mingles. But it’s not a thing, it’s not a product. It just appears that way on our schedules. We’ve talked a lot about how really there are echoing generations of motion and recording. The sound I’ve been performing is ⅔ pre-recorded… when you work with dancers outside or in the studio, it’s all pre-recorded. Obviously you don’t make the tapestries during the performance: their lines extend back and forward from that juncture. None of those dancers is just making every motion up out of nothing–they’ve been labbing and practicing for years. We’re all passing through, echoing, conjoining, moving out. 

One reason I want to do a film is that a film is a long-term, long-lived, intricate water hole. It results from other junctures and encounters; it’s a compendium. Each shoot, with some movers, with some music, with some tapestries, in a terrain, captured through your framing motion… then is an element. Elements become mixings become elements. We can watch carefully. We can extend that calm consideration outward in time and space. The “object” will be the film and it will have film characteristics and do film things including meeting a thousand eyes… but still it’s not an object, not a thing… it’s just a longer junction. That meeting with the audience is also a junction… I always wonder though what happens to all those lines… you can’t see where they go and I have a cold ominous feeling most of them kind of go nowhere. Maybe that’s just pessimism. Of course some of them go rich places I don’t know, which is the point of sharing. But personally I really like that calm quiet focus of the studio. I’ve always liked art more in the studio than in galleries or museums. It’s in the making that what matters happens. The film making lasts longer than the performance, and its time has folds the performance lacks. 

Maybe as a last thought let me return to that observation I made when editing the footage from the recent two performances. What I noticed was that there were almost as many cameras (/phones) as there were people. For ⅔ the sets of two eyes, a third eye, digital… and then the actual eyes still sutured to their screen–like yours. Literally clouds of cameras swarming around the bodies, eating up the tapestries, breathing in the sound. Hungry digital eyes spewing digital lines to arid digital water holes. The large gathering is a media feeding frenzy. It’s almost indecent. I mean, I do it too, it’s not some one person’s fault, and it’s as interesting as it is disturbing. So many echoing recordings, recordings on recordings, assemblies and cuts spraying in all directions, like when they crash subatomic particles in a particle accelerator and you can see the super-dense squiggles of quarks exploding out. Performances, even when they’re calm, are still like that. When it’s just you with one camera, it’s less of an explosion and more of a deposit, an agreement, a digitized but still-human, still earthy exchange. 

But I know from our conversations outside this page that somehow I’ve not hit on what you’re aiming at. There’s still something about the difference in your looking in these two contexts that you know but I don’t; there’s a question you’re trying to formulate and I don’t think I’ve done it. So let me ask you: what’s the difference in these camera-lookings, floating on the front of your body moving? Why do you want to make a film? What do we develop in a performance that we don’t in more private shoots? What is there in the intimate encounter that is absent with the public? 

Intersection/Night, live performance July 13th, 2024, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA: Silvi Naci.

Iva: 

These are great “water holes” you marked, identified and described. I appreciate how you linger (your attention and your use of language) at certain junctions. I read/ hear you thinking through these complex questions and experiences and the image that pops into my mind is of a small kitten playing with a ball of yarn batting it in all directions. This project has many antecedents (everything does) and yet there is something weird and specific that I know happens in the moment of INTERSECTION. I love the more contained and solitary experience of being the sole witness holding the camera when we do the short films: a painting or two, a dancer and your soundscape. Being outside, draping the paintings over a wire in some neglected urban space feels really good and exciting. The world becomes intensely present to my senses in all of its mysterious details. I feel touched by its colors, movements, noises and smells. The world rustles and my nervous systems responds. When I hear your sound (even when playing through a tiny speaker hanging from a tree branch) I feel contained and held into a spatial and temporal fold. The hyper sensitivity turns to hyper focus. When a dancer as sensitive as Gretchen or Friidom enter that fold I completely surrender to just feeling alongside. It’s such a relief to step outside of my own subjectivity and practice such a radical encounter with another. What’s really interesting is that time and time again the same thing happens: both me and the dancer share in the “knowing” of the exact duration of this kind of intense encounter. It also takes a few tries before we truly “lock-in”. 

The performance is different. I am compelled to do it because it’s so out of control. I love the build of panic and then the unfolding. You are right that the presence of the audience (all those yes, both human and digital) fracture, dislocate and disorient exponentially but the energy is unbelievable. It was interesting to observe the audience response during the last performance at Night Gallery. The place was so huge, the paintings so many, the wind so persistent and the little kids running in all directions so unpredictable that it completely burst the “performance container.” People didn’t know what to do with their own bodies in response to everything. Many people got overwhelmed and confused so the crowd thinned over time but those who were taken over and stayed were transformed. People were shouting with joy afterwards and I kept hearing from any of them the same phrase “this is about NOW”, “it’s the expression of everything NOW.”

The performance at Wonzimer was smaller in scale and the audience created a circle around the two paintings and Gretchen and Friidom. Even when the paintings got pulled to the floor and dragged or ripped and the performance got intense the audience had a clear role and place at a distance. At Night gallery the installation was too big to be surrounded so the audience found itself everywhere. The unruly and ecstatic children darting in every direction and playing with the tapestries billowing in the wind added another layer of  wildness. 

Anyways, to go back to your question about the film. I agree with many of the reasons you so lucidly offered above. I would add that “a film” in my mind offers time. There are a few films like “The Color of Pomegranates” and Chris Marker’s  “La Jetee” and “Junkopia” that are important references in my thinking about how to approach this experiment. There is something quite impersonal and static about Marker’s “filming.” I want to practice that.

My upcoming painting show at Bradwolff & Partners in Amsterdam is called “Recordings.” I think this word names both something essential in my painting practice and something conceptually central to the Intersection project. I have been thinking about the work, the paintings as these membranes that record the unpredictable points of contact between the abstract landscape of my interiority (stacks of memories, habits, skills, emotions, etc.) and the concreteness of the world around me. ABSTRACT//CONCRETE interdependence and co production plays out and is recorded by the gauze, muslin and canvas. Paint is the messy medium that does it. The process is the condition of possibility. I like to imagine that when I paint I am walking through a field of wildflowers with a small reorder strapped to my chest with actual audio tape that has suffered many such walks, the recording layering on top of each other. On the last day of my show at Night gallery I talked in public with podcaster and painter Sarah Theibault. After the talk, someone I met pointed to Seascape: Moth and asked me how long it took. I paused and looked at the giant black painting across from it called Kukeri: Zmei and realized how different these two paintings were. Zmei was fast and furious, a two day affair interrupted by a 10 day trip to Pittsburgh and Philly where I gathered enough experience and courage to make that second day the last. Moth on the other hand took almost a full year, akin to writing a letter daily to a beloved now gone for a whole year using a single sheet of paper.

Excited to continue to experiment with you and our tribe of movement artists this fall and explore duration, attention, and somatic sensitivity. It will be interesting to return to this conversation in Part II after these next few months.

Kukeri: Zmei, 118 x 84”, Acrylic and gauze on canvas, 2024.