Come Listen - An Audio Story of Ghosts and Adventure!

In 2005, I performed a puppet show for PS1's Greater New York: Performance Series.  The story is called Can't Find the Bottom and is performed with my fabric characters, fabric collage backdrops, pre-recorded audio and me.

The audio recording was made with the help of the extraordinary Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio.  He and I share the voices of the characters.  Tunde did the recording.  It was such a joy creating this with him.  His voices are incredible!  

This initial story became the makings for a book I've been writing on and off for years.  It's about a woman who chases a hot air balloonist seeking a stolen treasure map and a misunderstood perception of love.  Throughout the adventure there are pranks, ghosts, cults, muddy hands, dead birds, bandits and old mercury mines.  There is understanding, heartbreak, laughter and self knowledge. 

You can listen to the recording at PS1's radio archives on their site or right here just below.  Give it a listen! 

Slideluck Potshow

In the late 1990s I traveled back and forth across the States for a variety of experiences that I wasn't always looking for and some that I was.  I saw a relationship collapse under the weight of the Colorado sky, discovered a friend I thought I knew become permanently delusional from drinking too much liquid acid and learned that building a fort inside a bedroom can make you feel more lonely than safe.  I contemplated the need for good urban planning, feel in love with the music of Jimmy Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders, was reminded that my mom is amazing and that true friends are easy to be around. During these trips I took loads of photos with my Canon Elf APS camera in panoramic mode.  I'm not much of a photographer and wasn't taking the photos for the sake of art, but more for documentary purposes.  I ended up with a lot of images that I was attracted to both in content and form.  I began pairing the images, making connections between colors, shapes and lines.  I had two full albums of these pairings and the project was meaningful to me.

In graduate school there was a fellow student who wanted to put my work in a group show that she was curating.  During a studio visit she discovered the albums and wanted to build an entire metal display structure for them as a collaboration between the two of us.  I was thrilled that the photos would be shown, especially since they weren't ever intended for that purpose.  I was asked to remount them on matte board for her display unit.  I spent hours getting the photographs together and handed her about 80 images of the works in a cardboard box I had laying around.  A few days later I showed up at the opening to see the exhibition.  Her huge display shelf was in the room, but my images weren't on it.  Instead, there was my box, an old cardboard box that must have shipped frozen meats or something, on the floor with the tape cut but unopened.  I asked her why the photos weren't up and she said that it was conceptually more interesting to keep them in the box since it had the word FROZEN printed on it.

Then came the opportunity nearly ten years later to put together a slide show for the Slideluck Potshow and I used those images.  Broadcast's song, Tears in the Typing Pool, accompanies the piece as it relates to the aforementioned experience and the parallel between text on a blank piece of paper and human development of the land.