portal for creative expression
This diverse group of artists seeks to present ideas outside of the existing capitalistic and patriarchal systems that dominate the world today. They also seek to examine our chaotic present in order to envision a diverse future.
Today I am participating in the performance with Shaun Caton – a performance artist who mostly works with painting and also creates performance-based, visual moving environments using light, shadows and painted cut-out characters that create scenes. Mixing painting and performance I am happy to get to know him and his work better. Looking at his website, he has a highly developed style, which I love.
I have finished the sketchbook inspired by the British painter Frank Auerbach, whose work has been showing the Alma Zevi gallery along the street from me. Like him, I have quickly sketched the scene outside my studio repetitively over a series of days as a means to get more connected with the subject. Perhaps I will turn these drawings into a painting.
The Swiss pavilion presents a video-art dance protest. The piece draws from queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz statement “the now is a prison house. Backward is the new forward or the other way around”. The work which is titled Moving Backwards is by Pauline Voundry and Renate Lorenz with 5 choreographers/performers: Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Latifa Laâbissi, Marbles Jumbo Radio, and Nach.
Hector draws circles in a very ritualistic manner and the black charcoal that he crunches in his mouth drips. It seems at once Medieval and futuristic. his performances, as he describes them, mediate movement, endurance, and ritualistic processes.
In a cave etching near Bologna, a pregnant Venus moon mother, fondly “Venere Artemide,” boasts a glorious pubic triangle symbolizing the gateway of life. Within Italian folklore, caves and grottoes are the “womb” of the goddess. The coming together of the people in ecstatic worship – Carnival – is her laughter.
The main motifs for this exhibition are the circle and downward linear gesture. I call them breath drawings. The idea was to translate architectural structures – line, form, and symmetry, found in the distinct cities of New York, Venice, and London – the places I have been living and working between over the past five years.
Women are the life bearers, light bearers, the nurturing, the maternal, manifesting the creatrix force of the Universe that needs to be recognised. That’s the paradigm shift the New Earth is waiting for, so that we could all peacefully and consciously coexist and co-create with the primordial Earth Mother Gaia.