Smell Like You Mean It

Here are some images from Karl Schwiesow's BFA show reception last week:

Karl himself, in piscatorial attire:

He walked up to one of his pieces, attached a small bellows, and began pumping with his foot.

Along the way to inflation, a few adjustments were made.

The crowd watched the emergence of a green silhouette.

Once the green silhouette was raised to its full stature, Karl produced a poem from his slicker, and read it (the title of this blog post is taken from the poem's concluding line).

The poem was returned to its pocket.

The performance's devolution was diligently recorded.

The bellows was used to deflate the inflatable.

Or perhaps the inflatable should simply be called the "deflatable" at this point.

And I'll leave you with a few more images from the show, both populated an abandoned.

Nesting

Back in 2008 I did a brief blog post about "The Nest," a structure Babs Laukat put together for the New Genres class; the nest still stands, though winter (and probably other forces) have removed the light fixture and the strands of twine. Kristin has been talking to Babs about staging a performance in the Nest; earlier today, Kristin worked with Teryn Jackson, a dance student at UNR, on working out some movement for the space. Sometimes a place just calls out for an activity. Teryn was very game, playing out suggestions from Kristin, me, Babs, and Bab's brother, Daniel. By the end she was covered in strips of bark and bits of wood; we gave her a little round of applause. Here are some pics:

Curtains For You

For the New Genres class, Becca had people follow a path through the woods behind the art building, reading notes that had been tacked to trees, as sort of markers on the path. Or creators of the path.

She had people walk along the path a slight distance from each other, so everyone could have a kind of "private" stroll through the words. The etiquette was a little weird and provisional. I was behind Russell and I kept slowing down, because I didn't want to intrude on his space.

And then the person behind me (I won't name names) actually lagged a bit too far behind, because he lost the thread of the path, and ended up taking a shortcut around the last few sentences.

These pics are somewhat out of order, and very incomplete. To piece the words together into a coherent thought, you'll have to venture into the woods yourself. I doubt the papers will be there for long; I have a feeling Becca won't want her work to turn into litter. Though the idea of the papers being left, and the sentences decomposing via the whims of rain and wind, is somewhat appealing.

But even if the papers are gone, it's a nice walk. I haven't done much exploring back there, so I saw a few things that were new to me -- between one piece of a sentence and the next, sometimes finding an interpolated backyard.

At the end of the path, there were closed curtains. Some curls of smoke wafted up from behind them. When everyone arrived, the curtains were parted, and a brief performance took place. I didn't have a camera with me at the time, so I have no visual record of the performance itself. I'm in the mood to just leave it at that.

And here, after the audience was gone, is the view from the stage.

Performatica: Performance

Here's some video and video caps of the performance. We had a disastrous tech -- a lift that crumpled, and the video wasn't working for the first 2/3 of the run-through. But the performance itself went fairly smoothly. The video wasn't really set up to capture the performance -- it's actually the video I was shooting to provide the live feed for the projection. It's very vertigo-inducing to shoot; I have to look at the projection itself to orient myself to the bodies of the performers.