During the month of May 2012, I will be emarking on a multi-disciplinary public art/social experiment project called the Remodeling Project. Please visit the mini-site to learn more, watch videos, and see photo documentation of the performance, taking place on an 8×8 floating platform in the Fort Point Channel of downtown Boston. www.heidikayser.com/remodeling.
photo credit: Raber Umphenour
Last night I fell asleep reading Allan Kaprow’s “Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.” His perspectives on life, art and performance are so in line my own that every time I read something he has written I feel mentally validated. Sarah and I were discussing the book over scrambled eggs, and coupled with the fact that I wanted to do something fun, we originally decided to perform a Kaprow exercise in the canoe. On further inspection, none of the exercises seemed appropriate for a canoe, so we decided to perform “Maneuvers,” which involves doors. We had the perfect door leading out the cocktail deck.
Carrying out Kaprow’s instructions felt silly but also frightening. His attention to social interactions and methods of analyzing these interactions are poignant and raw. They seem timeless and infinite. I thought about Naumann, Beckett and Dada.
I went for a kayak adventure after Sarah left. There are three ponds in back of the KG house, connected by tiny isthmuses of beach. I got out and dragged the boat over and back into the other ponds. I discovered some hidden stairs on the far end of one of the ponds, winding up into the woods to an adventure. I beached the kayak and filmed a walk up and down the stairs. I paid attention to each step, the rhythm of my foot falls, and the forward and vertical momentum of ascension.
Floating home in the late afternoon sun, I felt a calm I haven’t been able to get to in such a long time. Its still out of reach, that serenity, that bliss, but its near. I’ll get there. Maybe its just one more isthmus away….
Tomorrow predicts showers, but I have plenty of video, photo and writing to edit and distill.
Sarah Rushford arrived today and we got right to work, after having lunch on the “breakfast deck” of course. The mission, as we chose to accept it, was to construct some sort of wearable platforms to hold the cameras on the back of my legs. Wonderful engineers that we are, Sarah and I ingeniously came up with the above pictured contraptions, made of cd cases, zip ties, rubber bands, twine and alligator clips. McGuyver either would have hugged us or spat upon us. I think I would have been happy with either reaction. Although, watching McGuyver in 2011 just doesn’t carry the same fascination for me anymore. I guess I’ve moved on to House MD. He’s crankier but just as sexy.
So we did some preliminary tests with the positions of the platforms, but all in they seemed to working pretty well. We went to the beach. White Crest Beach has to be the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen. The dunes pour down the surf below, the water is emerald green mixed with the sky, and there hangs simultaneously an unworldly atmosphere of calm and wild.
Sarah filmed me tramping across the beach. I filmed my ankles tramping across the beach. It was very surprisingly difficult to walk wearing the cameras- I couldn’t extend my knees very much, so finding balance in soft sand proved challenging but oddly meditative. My attention had to be focused on every step, otherwise I’d fall and damage the cameras.
When we were nearly finished, the curious beach-goers who had been pretending to ignore me as I walked steadily and weirdly by them, came up to us and asked what we were doing. They all had theories that I had some kind of spinal injury and that the “braces” on my legs were some sort of physical or occupational therapeutic devices. They were surprised to hear that I was making an experimental video, but seemed interested nonetheless. I hope that perhaps they went home thinking about what it might mean if you could see what your ankles see.
Day Two: Monday September 26th
Today was totally annoying. The serenity of the KG house surrounding me, I awoke excited to try out my new Kodak Playsport cameras! I bought two since they were on sale at Best Buy- I haven’t owned a camera since college so the $250 to get two waterproof, shockproof HD video cameras seemed like a great investment. But alas, neither camera would recognize my brand new SDHC cards. An hour later and a lot more fed up with Kodak’s phone tech support, I started researching places to purchase an SD card on the Cape. This proved harder than I thought- I’m so used to having everything and anything I could ever want to consume or purchase within walking distance from my home in downtown Boston that it shocked me to learn that the nearest CVS was 35 minutes away! There are probably over 100 CVS (what’s the plural of “CVS” – “CVSi?”) within 35 minutes of my home in Boston. Best Buy and Walmart were over an hour away from Wellfleet. So- to CVS I went!
After explaining my maddening situation to the cashier at CVS in Orleans, she let me test out two memory cards in the Playsport. For whatever reason, the 2 gb class 2 San Disk seemed to work in the camera, and even let me shoot video and audio with seemingly no time limit, so I thanked Amy at CVS and went back to Wellfleet to try and get some shooting in before dark.
White Crest Beach was absolutely stunning at 4 pm. I saw about 6 people while I was there for 2 hours. The light on the water was glistening, multiple seals were floating in the waves, their heads like deep-sea divers from another planet, and sand pipers flitted speedily through the surf.I spent a long time walking around, shooting my ankles and the view they see as I carry them through the world, filming behind me and in front of me. The photo above is of my footprint next to an anonymous footprint, as I filmed my feet following the footsteps of another who had walked the same path as me.
Tomorrow, Sarah Rushford will join me to help shooting. I’ve been reading Thoreau’s “Walking” and writing about different “methods” of walking. The weather should hold for tomorrow, so I hope to get some good video and then begin editing…..
Day One: Sunday September 25th
I arrived at the Kugel Gipps House in South Wellfleet and sprang out of the car to check out the place before sunset. Peter McMahon, the Executive Director of CCMHT, came to to show me around and give me instructions. The place is amazing! I spent some time out on both the “breakfast deck” and the “cocktail deck” – staring out at the darkness, smelling the fresh scent of the pines, and listening to squirrel drop acorns from the tree-tops. Later on, after setting off the smoke detectors and nearly freaking out as I imagined all of the Cape Cod Fire Departments rushing down to save the “burning” historic house, I sat down to a nice rib-eye dinner. Big plans for tomorrow!
This ongoing body of work was made using an algorithm for branching. Written in Actionscript, the program has three options for each section of the branch: rotation, length, and how many branches to spawn. By repeating the algorithm a number of times determined by me based on the aesthetics of the output in realtime, I can create maps of randomness that are also a record of my decision to end the algorithm.
I then either choose to manipulate the finished files or leave them as they are created by the code alone. The prints are limited editions.
This project was a collaboration with students from Dan Roe’s Biological Form and Function class at Massachusetts College of Art and students from my Art for Social Change class at the Urbano Project. The students were given crayons and asked to chose either a color that represented their skin tone, or one that was a fantasy, like purple, or a color that was the opposite of what they identified with as their own skin tone.
They then carried out an exercise where they were asked to shave, break, peel and otherwise disassemble their crayon for ten minutes, or until they made the decision to stop. During this exercise they were to think about both the implications of the physical activity (shaving, peeling, breaking down) as well as to meditate on ideas of revealing, stripping bare, and unveiling in relation to skin tone versus identity. The students each wrote a paragraph about the experience which was displayed with their crayon remnants in the Arnheim Gallery, the Art Education gallery at Massachusetts College of Art.
This collaborative video sculpture with artist Sarah Rushford uses two identical video monitors set approximately five feet apart. The video, captured with a macro lens, is of my fingers tips breaking through water. Appearing refracted on the other video monitor, the fingers seem to reach through the empty space separating the monitors.
Proprioception is the sense that indicates where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other and whether the body is currently moving with required effort. This piece uses video to extend the human limits of proprioception. In the video footage, the surface of water is broken and rebroken, and defintions of inside and outside, horizontal and vertical, are intentionally ambiguous. The space between the monitors becomes a refracting agent. It is activated, charged with undefined memory and potential phenomenon.
Proprioceptive Refraction from Sarah Rushford on Vimeo.
The series “Very Becoming,” an ongoing body of work, deals with the idea of interstitial identity. The works explore what is left behind during a process of transformation. Searching the Internet for key words like “female figure” and “woman outline,” I have collected hundreds of female silhouettes.
Using an animation program, I then morph these archetypal female silhouettes from one recognizable form to another. A sexy hip thrust silhouette turns to one of playful dance, a confident businesswoman (signified by high heels and a briefcase, of course) morphs to a pregnant figure. I then extract from these animations the part that is most interesting to me- the in-between stages. Sometimes remnants of the original figure remain, a high heeled foot or a face in profile, but mostly these computer interpreted interstitial frames become like Rorschach ink blots, shapeless and open to individual interpretation.
The wall sculpture consists of 17 pairs of girls’ shoes, in every size I have worn. The shoes face into and out of the wall, representing that middle ground where you are neither coming nor going, but always growing. Each shoe is planted with the herb Thyme, creating a play on words that time itself, in the form of the ever evolving human body, grows out of one’s shoes.
The bottles displayed with the sculpture are the remnants of all the items used in creating the installation as well as the other pieces in this body of work, all from the two person show “Incidents & Reflections” with Tim Murdoch at Schiltkamp Gallery. Other pieces included The Safety of Mountains, and a crayon and pencil drawing titled Map Me. By collecting the pieces that fall off, the throw-away ends and discardable detritus, I attempt to remember the details while still grasping the “big picture”.
Spanning the Rift is a tension bridge made with 75 pairs of reading glasses, rubber bands and chain. The glasses are attached front to back, representing the ability to see into the past while simultaneously looking to forward. This ability literally creates a “bridge” for safe travel into an uncertain future.
The Stratum Corneum is the term for our outermost layer of skin cells. The Stratum Disjunctum is the cells that are partially detached from the Corneum, already dead yet still partly clinging to the skin’s surface. This installation was created from 7000 packaging air pillows, which I inflated in the Arnheim Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art. It is 5 feet 5 inches tall- exactly my height, and is cordoned off by a thirty foot rope made from ten years of my own hair.
In the human forearm alone, approximately 1300 cells/cm2 are shed per hour each day. Startum Disjunctum is a piece in which I attempt to hold fast to the pieces that fall off- as identity becomes nebulous with each sluffing of skin and with each hair cut. I try to make sense of the conundrum I feel in being continuously physically reconstructed while my sense of self remains intact.
