In the Studio with Mark and Judd
This is our second blog from our artists in residence, Mark and Judd, as they discuss what they are doing in the studio to prepare for the upcoming exhibition.
What is a sequence?
In the studio this past week we have begun to look at constructing a sequence of movement that we imagine will be bodies individually placed and spaced across the 10 individual screens on the external facade of HPAC. I imagine this space as a landscape; panorama but also as a continuum: a loop. Each time you get to the end of the line of the screen you have to return and build upon where you first started. We are exploring how do you begin a sequence and how it develops its own language, response and sources to respond to.
On May 9th we taught a workshop at HPAC for children in the neighborhood. We asked the children to walk across the catwalk screen space imitating themselves, their mothers and their grandmothers (it was Mothers Day in the United States). We were interested in how material developed over a sequence of time and how the movement changed and developed as they stepped into each of the screens of the external facade on the Catwalk. How did they embody each generation? How did they take on the life, energy and imagined body of their elders? We then asked them to alter and change their movements of the activities they do, their mothers do and their grandparents - what is it liked to perform and embody their grandmothers activity as if their grandmother was a planet? What is it like to perform and embody their mothers activity as if they had wings? We didn’t know what the outcome of the tasks we set forth would be but the intention, space and performance of what they presented was terrific for us to see as a sequence of movements traversed from North to South, South to North across the Catwalk space.
Putting America Back to Work:
What is a dance that is in 26,000 parts? A Precession takes 26,000 years; this is the length of time it takes the earth to rotate in its axis. We want to give ourselves this task [of examining the Precession as a dance in 26,000 parts]. It feels a little complicated and ambitious at this time but we want to see how the almost impossible task to give a specific focus, scale and build that we are not sure how we can begin to process in real time compared to that of machine time.
Sources that we are looking at/deriving movement and text from:
1. The early sequential photography of Muybrige saw a body or an animal performing a specific task that was broken down sequentially. We are interested in his photographs as a way to assist us in building this work as well as the visual comparison of the Catwalk external facade as a sequential formal frame.
2. Michael Borremanns, a Belgian contemporary painter, works with gestural moments that are portraits and landscapes of bodies caught in a specific talk or action.
3. New York Stock Exchange Gestures that show how stock exchange workers ‘perform’ the task of exchanging ‘stocks’ on the trade floor.
Images from the studio:
The photos show paper that we put up this past week. The blue and purple paper across the wall is 20 pages long and we wish for this to be a score line for us to insert and notate a 20 minute sequence that we memorize. We are thinking each page would equal 1 minute in time. The 10 green pieces of paper act as a visual for us of the 10 screen facade and is an anchor for us when we are working in the studio space.
