Collaborative drawings, 1:

The kids and I have been collaborating, of late, on drawings. I start one while they're at school and leave it on the studio table with a note for them to read when they come home and I'm at work. When I get home (late, after bedtime) from work I can see what they've modified. On luckier days, "home days", when we're home together, we draw side by side. Here's installment #1 of our collaborative drawings series:

This one is called, "Dancer and Bear." Here are our notes from the back:


- started by Becca Mack
- Chaviv added bear and spear
- Kathir made thumbtacks and squares and sun behind the moon, a comedy and a star, pointy shooters, and a mouse trail.
-Finis.

Sound and Light Studio

During the darker afternoons of this school year, I have been holding a workshop with the preschoolers of the Burlington Children's Space, working with light and sound in a dimly lit room. We have been exploring threads of narrative generated by the children in response to the invitation to experiment with projectors, homemade instruments, paper, black markers, and basic recording equipment. They decided early on that we were 'making a movie'. From phonemes, amplified vibrations and light particles, we are indeed doing just that.

We use a drawing projector with moving strips of paper, a slide projector with transparent slides and black makers, various rubber band sound-boxes and recycled percussion implements, a cassette tape recorder, and a digital video recorder. Some afternoons we focus on sound, taking turns being the "conductor" of the rubber band orchestra. Sometimes we listen to quiet music and tape many feet of paper strips together, drawing stories to pull across the projector ( and hence, the wall).

One method sequence we are now concluding began with a session of "naming instruments", where we closed our eyes and listened to the homemade instruments, generating stream-of-consciousness images in an oversized notebook. The next week I'd put pieces of paper bearing the kids' mental images (in words) into a basket and gave them markers rather than instruments, to draw the words. Now we are uniting the associated instruments with the drawn paper-strip stories, filming the projected 'movies' with homemade instrument soundtracks.

The end product of this collaborative studio exploration deserves to be shared with our community. The children have made a beautiful 'movie' over months of continuous work. I am looking forward to sharing the children's work with the larger community, hopefully in the form of a gallery exhibit, as well as a showing of the "film".

This project has been instructive to me as a working artist, in that the 4 and 5 year-old minds are so supple in their ability to envision big ideas and immediately pull focus to the work at hand, keeping the creative process fluid. Artists, I heartily recommend finding children with whom to work. They will infuse your process with enormous energy and vision.

Our Records Outlive Us

Our records outlive us:

The practice of recording and archiving audio and visual information is a (healthy) response to the awareness of our impermanence. There is something juicy and real in the act of organizing information for safekeeping, as evidenced by the recipe books, geneologies, discographies, herbaria, legers, and memoirs we are compelled to preserve.

To honor the human tradition of recording practices and make a little love letter to history, I'm making an artist's book and read-along-record soundtrack, due out in 2012. This is the culmination of 10 years of work in photography, mixed media, sound recording and turntablism.

My musical background includes study in music history, theory, composition and performance at Fordham University and University of Vermont. In 2000, I took a second (and a third) job to earn the funds to purchase two turntables, a mixer, recording equipment, and to begin collecting vinyl records. I began recording and editing mixtapes, playing dance parties, and playing a weekly radio show. Hip Hop culture is a rich environment for creative interaction with music history, and for experimenting with analog and digital technologies in composition.

Concurrently, I began to see my work in photography and mixed media as complimentary practices: photographs became visual "samples"; collages became "mixtapes".

As I began to study Buddhism and work in the field of Hospice, both modes of recording and organizing information (photography and sound recording) became significant to me in their relationship to impermanence; our records outlive us.

The project I'm working on now, "RECORDS", is an audio/visual essay on impermanence and archiving, in the form of an artist's book and pressed vinyl companion record. The form is borrowed from the read-along-record stories enjoyed by the children of the late 1970's and 1980's. I chose to borrow this form for its analog integration of audio and visual information, and because of its concurrence with the birth of Hip Hop culture. The title of the project is a play on words, directly addressing the subject of recording and archiving information, while engaging the interest of audiophiles, DJs, secretaries, librarians, and others interested in the human compulsion to and practice of organize(-ing) information.

I'm currently editing both the artist's book and the mixtape soundtrack.

One piece of the work is honoring the beauty of being alive in this world by documenting tiny things, everyday things. Showing the spectacularly ordinary things in a beautiful way. We have nothing more than this collection of days we call our lifetime. And the gratitude for being here to notice. The essence of the book is love. A celebration of impermanence. A testimony of engagement. Things do not last, but we love, work and celebrate nonetheless.

And our records outlive us.

Sparkling Finitude

"Our brief finitude is but a beautiful spark in the vast darkness of space. So we should live the fleeting day with passion and, when the night comes, depart from it with grace."

-Archbishop of Edinburgh, from the memorial service of Jane White Cooke, painter and lover of life.

Here is the link to her obituary:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/burlingtonfreepress/obituary.aspx?n=jane-white-cooke&pid=150915069

Here is my favorite line in the obituary:

"After the Academy she was awarded a fellowship to study art in Florence, Italy, where she rented a studio on the Costa San Giorgio and led a bohemian life, devoted to painting and fun." In the midst of grown-up concerns, I find this notion inspiring; perhaps the responsibilities of life are not in conflict with devotion to 'painting and fun'!

How can you devote 'the fleeting day' to passion? I'm going to plant morning glory seeds, lay a color wash over a really big canvas, and watch the swollen lake throw driftwood up its steep shore, over and over again.

See Jane's paintings here.