In the Studio with Ash Eliza Smith // Connected // Connecting

On Friday, April 24th, Mike, Josiah, and a group of virtual attendees spent the better part of two hours in the Studio with Ash Eliza Smith. Ash will be a participating artist in the exhibition Music.Video. which will run in our 2021 exhibition season. Mike, Josiah, and Ash will be continuing their conversation about how her work and how storytelling and the ‘virtual’ play a roll in her work. Of particular captivation was a conversation surrounding how we see and perceive ourselves in those ‘virtual’ spaces.

Activity: "The 'Me' is the Message"

"I am all things to everyone
I may be idle, but I don't know
The situation's really quite unique
They all believe every word I speak"

Radio Stars, "The Real Me" 1978

In our last studio visit, Ash Smith spoke with Mike about the unique opportunities to push the boundaries of our platforms of digital communication as we prioritize public safety while continuing to engage. Ash imagines opportunities to shift from the regular "talking head" platforms of zoom meetings and such to explore how we can engage with tools in VR and other media. This thinking also invites us to explore how our current practices lead us to interpret and reinterpret ourselves as we exist and communicate between the physical and digital spaces. 

Materials: 

Writing/drawing tool of any kind (pencil, pen, etc)
Sheet of paper 
Optional: Access to a mirror 

1. On one side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline of your profile (facing toward the center of the paper) to the best of your ability. Try posing in front of a mirror to see your profile as best as possible while you draw. 

2. On the opposite side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline that faces and mirrors your profile. 

3. In the space of the original profile, write a message of any kind. It can be a quote, an instruction, a question, etc. It could be a regularly used phrase you might use in the course of a zoom meeting or a facetime conversation.  

4. Now, focus on the space between your 'faces.' Imagine that this space represents the gate between your physical self and your "avatar." As Kent Clark enters the phone booth to transform into Superman, how might we transform (intentionally and unintentionally) when we enter digital spaces to ultimately re-emerge and create things in physical space? 

Within this space, use your drawing tool to make marks to represent a gate or portal between your selves. When satisfied, imagine your message in the original profile passing through this portal. What happens to it? Does it change in text? Tone? Purpose? 

5. In the space of the "avatar" profile, write a re-imagined version of your original message, after it has passed through the portal. What is the message? Is it any less or more reflective of you than the original message? 

CLICK HERE FOR Josiah’s Example

Clip from Ash’s Visit:

ABOUT ASH:

Ash is an artist-researcher who uses storytelling, simulation, and worldbuilding to speculate and activate futures—to shape new realities. Utilizing multiple platforms from immersive role-play performances to location-based experiences, Ash works across art+science, between fact+fiction, and with human+non-human agents to re-imagine systems, perception, and embodiment. Ash has worked as an actor, performer, musician, producer, director, and writer for various media platforms and is currently an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln where she has launched an interdisciplinary lab focused on story, worlds, and speculative design. 

https://www.projectblanksd.org/ash-eliza-smith

ABOUT MUSIC.VIDEO.

What in the past was considered two distinct entities; divided by presentation platforms, legibility, perceived intellectual rigor, class associations, etc. have become a swirl of interdependencies, mutual mimicry, and genre bending. So-called High Art and Low Art have both maintained these characterizations as facets of their composition, but have also taken on board their inverse. Increasingly, both Low and High explore a hybridized middle, neither rarefied art object nor pop cultural production, but more something simmering between.

In the Studio with Sarah Tortora // Connected // Connecting

Last Friday, Mike Calway-Fagen, and Education Consultant, Josiah Golson, spoke with in the Studio with Sarah Tortora. Sarah will be a participating artist in a 2-person exhibition with Mike Holsomback, which will run in our 2021 exhibition season.

Sarah and Mike spoke deeply about the theme of "love and trust" as things that we aspire to in our day-to-day and our practice. But how do we each hold the emotional spaces for those powerful themes and maintain the spaces where we make the things we make?

Activity: Love and Trust

On a blank piece of paper, draw a 2-circle Venn Diagram, allowing the circles to overlap in the center. Draw them big enough so that you have plenty of room to write within the spaces. 

Imagine that the space (or partial circle) to the left is the studio or office for your work.

Sit with this place and contemplate the work you do, the things you make, and the mindset you hold when working. Write a real or imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to practice and work in this space. 

Imagine that the space to the right is the studio for your Heart.

Sit with this place and contemplate what it is for your Heart to have a studio space in which to practice. Write an imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to have a studio for your Heart to develop its practice of love and trust. 

Imagine that the center space that both circles share is the intersection of your work on things and your pursuit of love and trust.

What do both studios share, what do they not share? Are there more ways where you can connect the work of one space with that of the other. Writing this part is optional.

Clip on Love and Trust

About Sarah:

Sarah Tortora (b. 1988, New Haven, CT) received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and served as a Lecturer of Contemporary Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia while in attendance. In 2016, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at GRIN (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College, and currently is a yearlong artist-in-residence as the Visual Arts Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.

https://www.sarahtortora.com/

Resources:

Sarah Tortora // The Grid Book // Rene Descartes and the Cartesian Split // George Simmel: The Stranger // Wabi Sabi // From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual // The Box Man by Kobo Abe // Dangerous Emotions by Alphonso Lingis // Die by Tony Smith // Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau // Collapse by Jared Diamond

In the Studio with Morgan Mandalay // Connected // Connecting

Last Friday, Mike and Josiah sat down (virtually) with Morgan Mandalay in his studio. Morgan will be a participating artist in the exhibition Combover, which will run in our 2021 exhibition season. Mike, Josiah, and Morgan continued their conversation about how his works reflect and draw out the themes in Combover.

In his practice, Morgan Mandalay mines narratives, mythologies, and different histories, “for some sort of personal resonance.” Let’s explore and mine our own personal narrative like Mandalay through the activity below...

Steps: 

1. Find a photo of yourself. It can be physical or digital and from any time in your life. 

2. In one sentence, write a description of the photo based on your best recollection or understanding of the moment it presents. 

3. In a second sentence, write an imagined description (or myth) of the photo and its origin, inspired by a work of fiction or art.

4. In a final, third sentence, compose a description of the photo that combines the first sentence and the second sentence. 

Send to us at friends@stoveworks.org, if you’d like it to be posted for viewers to explore and to try to decipher myth from reality. 

Example:

Josiah Golson, Chattanooga, TN

Fact: My friend and collaborator Roy took this photo of me by an electric box with a wrap of my art shortly after it was installed.

Myth: A stranger took this photo of me standing next to my art after they observed me painting this electric box.

A stranger named Roy took this photo of me standing next to my art shortly after it was painted on the box.

A Clip from the Visit:

Questions to think about:

Which description was most difficult to write? Why do you think so? 

How did you choose your fictional inspiration for sentence 2?

In our collective histories and storytellings, do you think we’re able to determine whether our narratives fit into one of the above categories like the exercise provides? Why or why not? 

About Morgan Mandalay:

Morgan Mandalay, along with being an artist, is the founder and director of the itinerant exhibition project SPF15 and co-organizer of Fresh Bread Gallery in Chicago, IL. Morgan has had solo exhibitions at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles, CA), Everybody (Chicago, IL), Cat Box Contemporary (Queens, NY), BWSMX (Mexico City, MEX), and Et Al Gallery (San Francisco, CA) among others. His work has been included recently in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Flag Foundation (New York, NY), Sibling (Toronto, CAN), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), DAMA (Turin, ITA), Kimberly Klark (Queens, NY), 0-0 (Los Angeles, CA), Galleria Acapella (Naples, ITA), Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), and Yautepec (Mexico City, MEX). He was a 2018 Fellow of Shandaken Project's Paint School in New York, NY. In 2017 he completed his MFA at University of California San Diego, and holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His works has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Autre Magazine, Beaux Art Magazine, Artillery Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times.

 https://morganmandalay.com/

About Combover:

The main point here is, despite your earnestness and best efforts, you’re not fooling anyone. But we’ll play along. The social contract must be upheld, I guess. Is this a moment where we both recognize the awkward mortality that reveals itself in each of our bodies and the frail attempts at defying death? Do these subtle gestures of subterfuge make folks more human, or are they less due to their having augmented reality?

The Stranger

My last name, Calway-Fagen, was an initial and essential indication, to me, that I wasn’t only one person. Further evidence emerges in the presence of the hyphen, tying the two together, a bridge between, an umbilical. I find it strange now, my parents having divorced very recently, that those two names remain mine, determined to return them both back to the body of the one.

This more than likely would not be a thought I would share publicly except that a great many of us are now thinking quite feverishly about bodies, your own and those of others. Just as, if not more critical is the analysis of one’s proximity to the bodies, others.

Similarly structured and equally as unpredictable is an undertaking of Taiwanese-American artist, Tehching Hsieh. The enterprise: Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece). The misleadingly straightforward title masks its own tautological complexity. Hsieh wants the simple to be the complex, and it is, it’s both.

The most direct path between two points is a straight line, and when those points are people, Tehching Hsieh and his invited collaborator Linda Montano, that line becomes a rope. For an entire year these two artists were bound together, forming one inconvenient organism.

Parameters set forth were few, but decisive. They had agreed that the 8-foot length of rope would remain fastened around each’s waist, that although they would never be further away from one another than the rope would allow they were never to touch, and that for the duration of the performance, one calendar year, they were forbidden to leave the single room they occupied for any reason.

(pause for effect)

Montano and Hsieh had only cursory interactions prior to their tying the knot, so to speak. They were strangers by normative cultural standards, but they quickly and voluntarily bucked their individuated autonomy opting instead for fusion and dependency. They had engineered each facet to render their new shared presence immutable. This seemingly inert state was in fact the exact conditions to enable a broad interrogation of fixedness, of stability; as those qualities define me, you, everyone, and everything.

Even as it all shapeshifts.

We all become kin.

- Mike Calway-Fagen

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 14

A Thought:

“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear might not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let out light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to others bearers of light. We are not alone.”
― bell hooks, excerpt from all about love

An Action:

Day 14: Based on LTLYM Assignment #44: Make Your Own Assignment

Today marks the final day of Stove Works’ daily thought and action.

“So for this assignment we are asking you to think up a LTLYM assignment and then to make one example of how it should be done. Stay within the realm of the website: assignments that bring people together and give them a new way to feel something.”

D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  “Write down your assignment idea as clearly and simply as you can. Include an example report that you produce for the assignment. The example can be a piece of text, a photo, video, drawing or sound piece, whatever makes the most sense for your assignment. “ Email to friends@stoveworks.org

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We will continue posting “Connected // Connecting” actions but on a weekly basis. All of the actions will remain on our blog and we encourage you to rummage through them and do them at your own speed. Any action at any time can be sent to our “friends” email account, and we will post them. Thank you. And stay safe and stay connected.

xo Team Stove Works

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 13

A Thought:

“Human movements,
but for a few,
are Westerly.
Man follows the sun.

This is the last place.
There is nowhere else to go.

Or follows what he thinks to be the
movement of the Sun.
It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
on a spinning ball.

This is the last place.
There is nowhere else to go.”

― Lew Welch, excerpt from THE SONG MT. TAMALPAIS SINGS

An Action:

Day 13: LTLYM Assignment #66: Make a Field Guide to Your Yard

“This assignment is for people who haven't spent much time with the land around where they live. So if you have planted a big, beautiful garden, that is terrific and you should go do another assignment. The rest of you are people who may not even really have a yard - maybe you live in an apartment and the yard is maintained by someone else, or maybe you just have a parking strip that seems to belong to the city. Maybe you live in a dorm and the "yard" is in the quad.

Leave your home with a camera and big piece of white cardboard. Look around. Each time you see a new kind of living thing, put the white cardboard behind it and take a picture of it against this white background. This will be easiest if you have a friend who can hold the cardboard up. Take photographs of every single different growing thing that you see. Notice grasses, weeds, flowers, trees, insects, birds, cats, dogs. You don't have to identify what anything is, just take a photograph, as if you are a scientist on an island that no human has ever set foot on before. “

D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  Make a series of 3-7 photographs. Send to friends@stoveworks.org

A Brumby

Austin, Texas USA
From Original LTLYM Assignment

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 12

A Thought:

“In both instances, [people] have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them. They are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times. The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

An Action:

Day 12: LTLYM Assignment #68: Feel the news

“Go to [ https://www.pbs.org/show/newshour/ ] and watch the current show. When the segment is over, choose someone from the news who made an impression on you. Imagine that you are them, and act out a moment of their day today. Choose an ordinary moment, one without dialogue, when they are alone - maybe the moment after they hang up the phone, or before they go to sleep. It doesn't matter what they are doing, only that you try to feel what it feels like to be them today, given what you know about their life right now. Take a picture of this moment, with the help of a self-timer or a friend. Don't bother dressing up like them, don't worry if you aren't the same race or gender as them. (And don't choose going to the bathroom, everyone else will do that.) Send the caption for the photo in an email - it should include the relevant news, for example:
  
Monday, August 13, 2007: After Resigning as Presidential Advisor, Carl Rove Looks into The Refrigerator
Or: Monday, August 13, 2007: Kim Kyung-ja, One of Two South Korean Hostages Freed In Afghanistan Today, Takes Off Her Shoes  

D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  Make a photograph and give it a descriptive, concise caption.” Send to friends@stoveworks.org

Natalie R

Portland, Oregon USA
From Original LTLYM Assignment

30 May 2008- After speaking out about high global food prices and their relevance to biofuel development, Kemal Dervis fixes himself a bowl of soup.

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 11

A Thought:

“People are just other things rearranged”
-Alan Watts

An Action:

LTLYM Assignment #5: Recreate an Object from Someone’s Past

Find someone that you don't know very well. Ask them to describe in great detail a significant object from their past. Write down the description. You can have them draw the object or you can draw it with their direction. Recreate the object three dimensionally as accurately as you can using only cardboard, paper and tape. Do not use colored paper, colored tissue paper or colored tape. Give it a title which includes the name of the person whose object you have recreated, such as "Nathaniel's Left Shoe." 

 D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  Take a picture of the object. Send to friends@stoveworks.org

Tam’s First Guitar

Catherine Forrester, Brighton, UK
from the original LTLYM Assignment

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 10

A thought:

"The premise that a photographer is a voyeur by the nature of photography is just not true. The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject. Some people believe that the photographer is always the last one invited to the party, but this is my party, I threw it."

- Nan Goldin, Interview with Mark Holdborn 1986

An Action:

LTLYM ASSIGNMENT #23: Recreate this snap shot

Work with someone else and try to photographically recreate this snapshot, to the best of your abilities.  

D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  Send us your recreated photo. friends@stoveworks.org

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Gallery Assignment #10: Laughing, Crying

James McKissic, Chattanooga, TN

“Raw, Red, Leather” inspired by Eddie Murphy’s Raw

Charlotte Caldwell, Chattanooga, TN

“Old Murphy Rd” inspired by a friend’s actions and impeccable comedic timing

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 9

A thought:

I am Universal, I burst;
I am Particular, I contract;
I become the Universal, I laugh.

- Rene Daumal, Pataphysical Essays

An Action:

ASSIGNMENT #9: Draw a picture of your Laughing

Think of a time you laughed so hard you cried. Think of the people that you were with and where you were. Draw a picture of the moment that made you bust.

D O C U M E N T A T I O N > Take a picture of your drawing. Give it a title. Send it to friends@stoveworks.org

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