DON’T GIVE THE ANGELS HALO LICE: The creation of “18 Paintings” Part 1

Hello blogosphere! It's been a wonderful and hectic few months -- and it seems I've forgotten to post about it. I was extremely fortunate in October to be invited as a member of THE POUND, a new Emerging Artist Residency at INTAR. There, I've been building a piece called 18 Paintings. Keep checking back over the course of the next several weeks to see read more about the work.

When film was first being introduced to the public consciousness, early filmmakers had to ask themselves how their work could differ from the predominant form of entertainment -- theater. Companies such as the Lumiere brothers and the Edison company answered this challenge almost anthropologically -- by filming small bits of life. These early films could be intimate moments, such as William Heise’s May Irwin kiss or footage of theatrical performances such as Loie Fuller’s Danse Serpentine.

Today, with the accessibility of film and television, theater no longer occupies the same social space it once did. So, as theatermakers, it’s now our turn to ask what makes theater inherently theatrical. For the past several months, short delicious theatrical images and moments kept on popping into my head. I wanted to find a way to piece them together without having to create a narrative structure around them. My mind wandered back to those early films -- potent emotion moments that extremely captivating in the absence of narrative.

Because this piece was going to be so rooted in the visual, I began to think a lot about how visual information can be delivered in a theatrical setting. How does the way people look at visual art differ from the way they watch performance? Can you relate to a static image the way you relate to a character in a narrative? What kind of imagery provokes emotion?

The kind of events I was dreaming up always included a set of iconography that sprung from Medieval paintings -- I was specifically enamored with several tapestries and tryptichs that hung in the Metropolitan’s Medieval Art Wing, such as this. These images not only include an set of iconography that evoked emotion but also were dramatic in the way they were laid out.



Madonna and Child with Angels
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Pietro di Domenico da Montepulciano

I kept wondering how this set of imagery could be transposed today. Friends recommended the Banksy movie, Exit Through The Gift Shop about street artists (which I, in turn, highly recommend). I was drawn to the work of the artist Space Invader, whose pixelated like critters looked like something out of a computer game.



Work by Parisian street artist Space Invader

Armed with this research, I started to bring in performers. Check back in a few days to find out how the piece started to evolve!