portal for creative expression
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.
Today Eileen Haring Woods, an artist from New York living in Suffolk, England, is showing her two-screen video piece I Look To You at the exhibition Alive in the Universe, at the Palazzo Pesaro Parafava, Venice. I head over there under an umbrella before opening up my gallery. I’m very glad to have made that effort. It’s a beautiful 15-minute work that evokes a sense of contemplation on the theme of interconnectedness.
Today I am preparing for the arrival of a friend and colleague who is a prominent performance artist and curator from New York, Hector Canonge, who is arriving in Venice to perform a piece created especially for my off-site project titled SOMAGRAPHIKA