Looking for Meaning in the Pacific Trash Vortex

With all the coverage around the gulf oil spill lately I’ve been thinking about beaches when I was a kid. Growing up near the coast in the states, we spent a lot of time beachcombing and scavenging the shoreline. When lucky you’d find bits of beach glass, the frosted shards produced by the tumbling action of the shore. Through a simple process garbage was transformed into gems, and there was a hierarchy and system of colours based on rarity. As I got older this glass was gradually replaced by the then still exotic plastic castoffs from Asia; strange junk food wrappers, laundry detergent, and unknown bottles labelled in foreign script, all caught in a direct current from afar. Then it seemed evidence of some elephant’s graveyard of objects, a place where things were drawn to as a final resting place out there, and you were lucky to catch a glimpse of on shore.

And now one hears about the great Pacific Trash Vortex, an immense floating island of plastics and sludge that some say is the size of Texas or possibly the entire continental United States. We’ve made a destination of our garbage, and as such it may still be an elephant graveyard of sorts, however instead of the fevered desire of poachers, we’ve constructed a manmade continent or monument of temporary objects that never break down, always hovering just past our shore and accumulating.

What does this mean when things don’t break down or go away, but instead continually accrue? Exploring this is Ramin Bahrini’s film ‘Plastic Bag’ about a discarded bag struggling with its immortality, and narrated by Herzog.

Martin’s Branwell

Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell is a novel that bleeds the line between novel and historical fact. It’s written in a style that traces the tragic story of Branwell Brontë and composites it through the lives of those involved, from golden child and hope of the family to drunken dissolute, all while the politics of family allegiance drift and Branwell falls further into oblivion. This hallucinatory narrative shifts back and forth, switches tense, shows us one reading only to challenge it later, and ultimately unfolds a tale embroidered of speculation, suspicion, and earnest confession, where one is never certain of the absolute truths.

The novel feels invitingly Nineteenth Century, a lost Jane Eyre, yet contemporary and pluralistic. Like Victorian novels it follows the main character from early childhood until death, but here the voice is many blended perspectives. The result is a dream or hallucination that feels true and harvested from the period. I’ve always had a soft spot for old British novels like Jude the Obscure, Mill on the Floss, or even Moll Flanders. This has the same sense of inevitable doom, with damp decayed surfaces, but the success of Branwell is that it doesn’t mimic these other works. It’s not a copy of style, but something hybrid and new hewn out of the pieces of something else, halfway between poetry, biopic, and a novel.

Liminal Space in The Science of Sleep

When The Science of Sleep came out in theaters I was teaching a Surrealism class to a group of about thirty high school students at a public school as part of my film program. One of the hardest things to teach students at that age is content. They were great with technique, craft, and formalism, but the hardest thing was to get them to understand what their work was or could be about. This class was probably one of the most successful tools I had for helping students to understand this leap, and in retrospect it helped me with my understanding of the film The Science of Sleep.

Hello Central, Give Me Heaven, Hello Central, Give Me No Man’s Land

Hello Central, Give Me Heaven, Hello Central, Give Me No Man’s Land was a collaborative new work that combined video images from the ‘between the wars’ years with audio clips from notorious and anonymous figures of the era, then set to an original musical composition. Original prints and etchings created a panoramic scroll of architecture and gesture.

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Bridget Irish at the Tollbooth Interview

Continuing the wrap-up of interviews from the first year of the 24 hour outdoor video project the Tollbooth Gallery, here is an interview with artist Bridget Irish. Her Tollbooth Junction 11th & Broadway was a collection of various subway rides the artist took over the past several years, and filmed on Hi-8 video. Featured subway routes, shot when traveling above ground and during the day, included: NYC’s D-Line Brooklyn to Coney Island route and back, Chicago’s downtown loop from the Green Line, and Boston’s Blue Line from downtown to last stop Wonderland. These videos are as much studies in motion, form and light, as they are travel diary excerpts.

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Wynne Greenwood of Tracy + the Plastics talks about her installation at the Tollbooth Gallery

“How do you map a hope, a flower, a muscle, a gaze, a breath, an exhaustion, an attempt, a history, or your community? You are here.” Originally from Washington, then Brooklyn based Wynne Greenwood returned to the Northwest to premiere her piece, Maps to Radical Imagining, specifically created for the Tollbooth.

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Interview with Tim Sullivan about Perfect Entrance

Here we are again with the interview series. Perfect Entrance by San Francisco-based artist Tim Sullivan was, at its core, a commentary on the art world’s hyperbole regarding notions of ‘emerging artists’. Sullivan tackles the thin line between comedy and tragedy, impending doom, horror, slapstick, and vulnerability. Sullivan also talks about his then collaboration with George Kuchar to reproduce Chris Burden’s SHOOT piece.

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My Interview With Artists Delta Camshaft Collective

Rorschach Notions, a collaborative installation featuring the work of a group of artists going by the name of the Delta Camshaft Collective, was part of a larger event entitled Scattered Ephemera,which culminated in city-wide exhibitions and a performance by NPR commentator author, Andrei Codrescu.

Rorschach Notions took its name from late 19th Century Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach who pioneered the usage of inkblot tests in modern psychological analysis. The exhibit consisted of a video screen flashing period photos of Tacoma while two ‘subjects’ interpreted the narrative. On the reverse side of the kiosk was an interactive paper installation of antique wall paper, artist drawings, and prints that implored the viewer to remove and explore, thus creating their own modern ephemera.

Read interview here.

Rising Up

Portland based filmmaker and artist Vanessa Renwick collaborated with the People’s History Poster Project and audio artist Donovan Skirvin to create an installation entitled Rising Up at the Tollbooth Gallery. Renwick’s filmmatic subject matter ranges from gray wolves to library books, obsessive collagists to pro-life advocates, and the lives of truckers to her own bare-foot hitchhiking. Her work has been described as “delightfully idiosyncratic” and “rigorously experimental.” What follows are excerpts from an interview with the artist about her work, and her intentions with “Rising Up.”

Read interview here.  

My Art Interview with Denise Smith

Denise Smith is a visual artist who did an early installation at the Tollbooth Gallery project. She was heavily involved with Toby Room and contributed to ArtRod’s ongoing touring experimental film/video series Don’t Bite the Pavement. Here’s an entertaining interview I did with Smith that was part of the Tollbooth interviews. Her topics range from the Dalai Lama, Paris Hilton, and designing outfits for  bad public art.

Read interview here.