Very Rough Documentation of "Mary and Sarah and You and Me"

Click to Play

This is a 45 minute documentation video of the August 1-2, 2008 work-in-progress "Mary and Sarah and You and Me" made by Naima Lowe and Emmy Bean.

I think this is real...

I wrote this today as a statement of artists intentions for a job that I'm applying for. It is longish (perhaps too long for a job application), and I'm not sure that it is what I'm suppose to do. But I think I really really mean it. So here it is.

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Naima Lowe

Statement of Artists Intentions and Recent Work

Statement of Artists Intentions

I have a really good work ethic. For some, a good work ethic means waking up every day and getting straight to the drawing board. For others, it means feverishly toiling in front of a screen or on set at all hours of the night. My work ethic comes from a deep desire to treat everyone who takes part in my art work; collaborators, audience and myself; with deepest respect and care.

I live in a world that feeds on fears of scarcity, pushes allies into competition, and is fueled by consumption rather than creation. As the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter of jazz musicians, teachers, social workers, dress makers and field hands, I have the profound privilege of being reminded daily that I am nothing without my collaborators in the creation of joy and abstraction in the every day. In my work I push back against scarcity by being devilishly baroque, undermine competition by teaming with those who challenge me most, and treat all of my work (even the consumable parts) as lived aesthetic experiences in which process is barely distinct from product.

Recent and Ongoing Works

My work usually revolves around the strange complexity of identity formation, especially the way that we are both utterly fixed by our bodies and completely free to make it all up as we go along. My 2007 film Birthmarks explored the physical and psychic scars of violence through the ever morphing relationship between a father and daughter. In addition to collecting archival material and creating original writing and installation works to be filmed, I made a series of intentional spaces in which my father and I could challenge ourselves to look closely at the series of dark scars on his back that he received by being beat up by the Newark Police in 1967. The collaboration with my father largely revolved around a jazz improvisational model during which we agreed to a key and tempo (Newark, the riots, 1967), felt confident in each others’ knowledge of our instruments (him-Bass Trombone and storytelling, me-16mm camera and poetics), and then challenged each other to play our best. There were moments in the two year process of creating this film when I wanted to scream at my father for being inconsistent, or untrue to myself by pretending not to feel the pain brought about by the work, but I chose to remain present and accountable to my work ethic. I choose to remain true to my aesthetic vision while being kind to myself and my father. The experience was as unwaveringly honest, complex and affirming as I believe the film turned out to be. .

My more recent work has me delving more fully into the relationship between identity and historicity. In addition to research on the film work of Kara Walker and her status as a black post-modernist within the institutional fine art world, I have considered my own power as an artist to shape and mold the images of fictional and real subjects. In my work Mary and Sarah and You and Me: A Series of Tiny Spectacles, I have created a densely theatrical and spectacle driven world based on the lives of real life 19^th century women. Stagecoach Mary Fields was a black cowgirl, and Mother Sarah Amadeus Dunne was the white nun whose story is entwined with Mary’s in the small white Montana town in which they lived. In creating this work I sought the help of a friend (Emmy Bean) and fellow alumna of a musical theater camp, whose life as a queer, white radical Christian echoed mine as a queer, black, artist brought up in mostly white central Connecticut. I knew that in order for us to go about writing, rehearsing, making music and videos, and researching 19^th century pioneer life, we would have to deal confront ourselves pretty head on. Our joint work ethic included intensive weeklong sessions that were always punctuated with trips to the beach, time to see our families, and space to breathe and cry as needed. We warmed up by singing show tunes, and always made sure to have good food available for ourselves and anyone working around us. The resulting work is a layered experience for spectator and artist alike that includes storytelling, video installation, song, over-head projected photographs, and puppetry. We utilize some aspects of a stripped bare gallery aesthetic in order to situate our audience in a familiar mode of art consumption that gives the audience space to consider their own place and implication in the work. We also tell rich, detailed, visually dynamic stories about forbidden love, racial injustice, and religious fervor. These tales shift and evolve before the audiences’ eyes as we interrogate the integrity of our own project, and ask ourselves why we feel that these women’s lives are ours to reshape.

The mundane aspects of my creative practice may seem too vulgar to state as an part of my artistic intentions, but I have found it useful to remind myself and anyone I collaborate with of them. Too often I find that experimental filmmakers, video artists and performance artists, like myself, have given themselves over to solitary, auteur, obsessive, and self involved practices that ignore the pleasure and collectivity that comes along with our transgressions. I work very very hard, and I care a great deal about craft, make no mistake. But I have chosen this artists life for myself, and I intend on enjoying it.

A Strange White Box

I have rented and currently inhabit a 520 sq foot studio in a converted warehouse in an industrial/residential neighborhood in NE Philadelphia. This is by no means a strange state of affairs. I am like many other young (and older) artists, craftspeople, filmmakers, t-shirt makers, musicians, and entrepreneurs who take up residence in these spaces, working to fulfill our creative dreams, to fulfill our landlords dreams of gentrification, to fill these weird empty boxes that once housed industry.

I like the imagine that they still house industry. I suppose in the case of some of my neighbors, this is true. There's the recording studio next door and the paper maker downstairs and the jewelry designer down the hall.

I do something else entirely, and I've somehow decided that the best thing to do with this THING that I do is house it in a big cube that I've painted white and filled with equipment and paper and paint and brushes and books and fabric and other shit that I've collected over the years.

That is the magic potion, right? Mix collected shit, good ideas, ambitious new MFA holder in a nice big asbestos filled container and WHAM, BANG POOF! You get art.

eh.
Not so much.
It is an interesting trick to train myself to to do my art in this space. My practice is so much in my head. I read books, I have conversations, I pace up and down, and watch TV. I apply to things, and then I read more books. And cull video footage on occasion, and then I hatch this gigantic plans that do, in fact, require space and junk... But in the meantime, its that other stuff. I'm making art RIGHT NOW (said the girl about to drink some Ting and watch Bravo), and I'm not in my studio. What does that mean? Will it be lost forever because I haven't hatched it in the place where it will be best nurtured? Will it die on the way to its nursery?

But, this is what discipline is shaped of, and I think that discipline isn't such a bad thing. I sit there for 2-3 hours at a time, and I read, write, apply for things, organize things, look at videos, and pace up and down. I give myself a break. I read some more. Those 2-3 hours started out as nothing but fear of even showing up in that place. And then it was 1 hour, and now its 2, and in a while I'll probably stand to be there for days and days at a time.

In my cauldron, my cube, my asbestos box, my obligatory art cubicle with its total lack of heat and shitty ventilation.

EE Miller is Cool

http://eemiller.wordpress.com/death-jewel-radio/

Ahhh, I performed didn't I?

Soooo, here are some stills drawn from video documentation of Mary and Sarah and You and Me. Yikes, I'm actually really excited about how it looks. That is a relief give n the fact that I've been on the post-show down slide for a while.

The video is coming soon!


projectors in a dark room
naima scowling



emmy as a barker.

Teaching and Blogging

I'm teaching two classes right now. Well, technically I'm teaching three. Two sections of a course called "Media and Culture" at Temple University, and one section of a course called Cinema Arts at University of the Arts. My Uarts students have a blog, in which they post reviews and commentary about films that they watch outside of class. I'm really excited about the blog because I get to see what my students are thinking about outside of class. It's also a way for me to think about films that I might not otherwise watch. Hooray for technology.

I chose not to do a blog for my Media and Culture students, but I'm regretting it now. I think it's a great tool for getting students to write and take some accountability for what they write because it is out in the world. It is also a nice record for all of us of the work we've done in class.

Material Girl

This elongated process of packing up all my belongings into a new house and a new studio has me anxious and excited. As usual, I go through all of my books, papers, clothes and letters and remember things about myself and past... Really finding out about myself, once again, through objects.

And in the process I'm discovering my fascination with objects, and forging new project ideas around these objects. I want to deal in the physical and tactile. I want sentimentality and dust in my nose. I'm talking about burying and digging up burlap, stacking up VHS tapes and buying old red telephones from ebay. I don't expect much to come out of this... Just a messy room in a converted fastener factory.

It is strange to start with writing, get educated in image making and end up caring most about things I can hold in my hands. It is strange to suddenly feel like something of a formalist, or a materialist, or maybe a situationist or another one of those words that I don't quite understand. But then maybe we're all formalists at heart, even the people who claim concept above and beyond all else. Aren't, after all, my body and thoughts made of SOMETHING. Aren't there aesthetics in the everyday?

I'm not supposed to be blogging on vacation...

But I am me, so here I am.

I have the following projects, new and old on my mind lately:

Documentation of my thesis show: Mary and Sarah and You and Me

A short video about self identified fat activists to be filmed at NOLOSE

Reading a book called "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriard

Painting and setting up my brand spanking new and exciting studio

Today I...

Rented a Studio!
I sort of couldn't be more excited about that fact. I didn't realize just how much I needed/wanted to have a little space to call my (art) home. I've been working in my apartment for the past four years, which has been nice and all but... Well, for one thing I'm moving in with my special lady friend, and I want our home to actually be our HOME. Also, this space is actually designed for the kind of work that I'm doing. In the 500 square foot square of loveliness, I get to build, paint, light things, video things, run, jump, dance, not to mention store all of the shiiiiit that I use for doing the aforementioned projects. I am very excited to paint the whole place a pretty color, bring in a mini-fridge, build some bookshelves and start moving all my shit into its proper home.

Done and Not Done

The first incarnation of my project "Mary and Sarah and You and Me: A Series of Tiny Spectacles" was by all accounts a success. We performed the project at The Parlor this weekend, with a lot of help from so many wonderful people, and I can't believe how much I learned from the process. Emmy Bean is a rock star, and such a good collaborative force. I feel so proud of us both.

When I say that it was a success, I don't mean that everything went perfectly, or that everyone loved it, or that we were perfectly happy with all of the outcomes. It was a success in that we stuck to our ideas, pushed ourselves way beyond our usual limits (Naima Acting! Emmy Yelling at People!) but in a way that felt supported and sane and towards good ends. I also feel successful because I feel a few steps closer to doing the sort of work that I've been dreaming of for years, and wishing for the courage and resources to get done. So, with a whole lot of help, not to mention gaffer's tape, wiring, and prayer, I managed to put this thing together. (Video documentation coming soon)

I also feel excited for what the future holds. We have big dreams for this project, in terms of taking it farther and faster and better and more. Next stop seems most likely to be somewhere in Western, MA so that Emmy's community can get a look at the work. Also we're hoping for a New York showing in the late fall or early spring. No details yet, I don't want to jinx it.

My friend Amy Walsh wrote something really keen on her blog about the economics of art-making, as she's been entering a new phase of taking control of the distribution of her work in order to make a reasonable living.

I think about these things as well (what artist doesn't) though in some different ways. I too find myself wondering how much I'm at the mercy of the dream of art stardom, though I feel very lucky to have grown up around many working artists (musicians mostly) who weren't stars, but who made livings, made good work, and had that core of appreciators of their work that made all of it so livable. I've also seen one of those people, who I happen to be very close to, end up in the latter years of his life with relatively few resources at his disposal. It is always hard to see someone you care about suffer in any way, but in light of the ways that I've been trying to pursue my art-life dreams, it feels so frightening.

But I wonder what it is that really scares me so much? Is it really the threat of being broke? I mean, that is a real threat, and something that is on my mind quite often. However, I am a fairly well educated, capable, able bodied person. I have many advantages in this wild world of capitalism working in my favor, including a community of people around me who are invested in my success. I can find work, and I can live cheaper if I need to, and everyone dodges the student loan man for most of their lives, so I think I can handle that.

The real fear, I think, is that I can no longer pretend that I'm "trying" to be an artist in any sense of the word. I am one, in terms of making work that is public, known, recognized, controversial... Some of it is good, some of it isn't so good. I have to stand up for myself and the ideas that I put out into the world, which I suppose I've been doing for a while now, but somehow seems more REAL right now because I'm about to work without the net of being "a student" or "doing this on the side."

In the next few weeks I'm going to go about getting teaching jobs in the arts that pay crap, I'm going to get a studio to work out of, and I'm going to start applying for all the grants and residencies that require things like a portfolio, a bio, a resume, an artists statement...

These are all very reasonable and not at all strange next steps, but somehow they seem so incredible right now...

The Devil is In

Details, details, details...

It seems there's nothing more. There is something strangely soothing about that fact, but also so exasperating, as I seem to enjoy the big esoteric though process so much more. But, the details are what makes meaning, or so it seems right now.

So, we buy rubber matting, bulbs, poster boards, bottles of water and we worry about timing and scale and height and light.

I think that this has officially become WORK, though I'm not entirely sure what that means.

Yay! We've got promotional materials!

And, a website!

Good Work is Hard Work

Emmy (collaborator extrordanaire) and I had a moment today of stopping, sweating, and saying "This is hard. What we are trying to do here is hard. We're hardly inventing the wheel, but there aren't a lot of blueprints for the work we're trying to do, and that makes it extra hard to get it done and feel confident in the progress.

I imagine that many artists, no matter what they're trying to accomplish, have these moments of self doubt. It is our nature to be in constant states of existential crisis I think. I do, however, wish that we could find ways to nurture ourselves through this part of the work.

Our best approach is to push on, try our best, and make sure to take a dip in the river after a long rehearsal day in 95 degree weather.

Assistance Please?

Actually, this isn't a call for assistance, because I have some truly amazing people helping, assisting, collaborating and otherwise being supportive to me on my thesis project. I've got around 7-8 people (in addition to Emmy of course) playing major roles in this project right now, which isn't so strange within the worlds of film and theater, but is perhaps less seen among those I lovingly refer to as "the art kid crowd."

These are people whose work is seen in galleries and museums and such. They are known for their individualism and singular work ethic and unique vision... Though plenty of them have artists assistants who do much of their actual grunt work and get no practical credit. Perhaps the film and theater worlds are more pragmatic and democratic in their recognition that there are craftspeople who do much of their "work" for them, and that those people deserve recognition, training and union benefits.

For me, having people helping me with my project who are competent, smart and willing to put in plenty of work on my behalf is daunting, but also forces me to work harder at making my project worthwhile, and at making the process as smooth, equitable and fun as possible.

I wonder what that will mean for my future in "the art world" vs. "the film world" vs. "the theater world." I wonder if it matters.

Work Ethics

Today I spent several hours in the recording studio at school creating some very crucial sound for my project with the help of two very smart and competent sound producers. We worked hard and well on about 8 pages of text and 1 song, all of which came out beautifully I think.

I really pride myself on having calm and reasonable shooting/creating schedules, especially when I'm working with other people. I've started to think of this as my work ethic. It isn't that I don't work hard. In fact, I generally spend many hours ahead of my shooting preparing so that I can feel confident and prepared for the work. I then make sure to overbook our time. That is to say, I know that we probably could have done those recordings in fewer hours, or that we could have recorded more, but that would have felt rushed and insane instead of calm and fun.

I feel strongly about this ethic because I think that it respects the people who help me, and it respects my values as a person living in the world.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't that I don't believe strongly in the work and it making it come out right. I slog away and certainly harbor perfectionist tendencies. I just also believe that good work is as much in the process as in the product.

In fact, I know that in my own work, things that took hours and hours of backbreaking, frightened, upsetting labor don't look or feel as good as things that came through organization, competency, and the ability to create a fun atmosphere for everyone involved. I also know how much I hate working with or for people who don't treat their collaborative work in the same way, even though there are so many people who believe that a beautiful outcome is worth suffering for. Don't artist suffer enough just with self doubt, and brokeness and frustration and fear of not being accepted? If we aren't really enjoying what we do, what the hell is the point?

Goals for the Weekend...

My hope and dream for this stage of Mary and Sarah and You and Me: Make it fun again!

Lately I've been really bound up with the less fun aspects of trying to make a large scale project happen, but I'm hoping to let go of some of that this weekend by a) seeing my project partner Emmy, who always has such good, fun energy b) finding assistance with some of the technical aspects of the work and most importantly c) finding assistance with the logistical aspects of the work.

It has finally become totally clear to me that I'm working on something akin to a small scale theatrical production which means that I need someone to act as a Production/Stage Manager whose job it is to take the logistics out of my hands. I think I've found that person, pending scheduling issues. If that turns out to be the case, it will become her responsibility to make schedules, attend to budgets, and yell at people who aren't doing their jobs.

Let's all pray to the scheduling gods that this will turn out well.

And let's all pray to the recording studio gods that the audio session that I have scheduled for tomorrow afternoon goes smooth as butter.

Onward!

Crisis Temporarily Averted/Artists are their own worst enemies

I believe that the self doubt was brought about by heat and time crunches and watching other projects go on about me. At first I thought I was jealous of the size/scope/progress of my fellow film students projects, until I realized that it was actually empathy. My friends/colleagues are in exactly the same boat as me: We are young, ambitious, hard working, broke and want to do the best that we can in the best ways that we know how. As a result we cycle through varying cycles of self doubt, fear, shame, exuberance, ego, exhiliration, frustration, etc. Perhaps this is true of anyone excited about their avocation? I would imagine so.

Mostly what seems to be true is the fact that I have made a minor breakthrough with my project, and that it is becoming clearer and more fully fledged all the time. I am also learning, growing, reaping new benefits, and generally coming to appreciate that I'm willing to dedicate all of this time, energy, money and spirit to my work.

Here, in case you are interested, is a little piece of video from the work. It is part of a video installation that will be a section of the final product. It is very rough, and not quite finished, but I'm excited about the looks of it.

When help is needed, whom do you call?

Aha, so it seems that I am trying, once again, to manage a great big confusing project all by myself, and I need the help of a producer to help me get the job done. However, I don't have one, and I don't know how to get one, and it is way too late to make this happen because I'm so overwhelmed with the details at this point.

Why, oh why am I always in this situation...

Arg.

The ways that I procrastinate

I'm thinking that if I ponder (and perhaps share) the ways that I procrastinate away from doing my work, I might figure out how to stop procrastinating. Or perhaps figure out what it is about these activities that is important to me, and maybe learn how to incorporate them into my art practice.

I clean my house (though not all that well)
I play various silly simulation style video games
I watch episodes of The Wire on DVD
I watch episodes of Battlestar Gallactica on the internet
I read other people's blogs
I shop
I bake

What can we learn from these things? That I'm a suburban housewife? A 12 year old boy?

Yes and Yes, in various ways.

I think that it also means that a) I'm obsessed with screens, addicted really. Dernit all to hell, they are just so mesmerizing. b) I like stories that are about race and subjugation and despair. But laced with humor and queer sexuality. Well, duh. c) I like to play house.

Well, tune in next time when I figure out how to turn this all into productivity.

Inspirations and Life and Work and Everything

Aha!
I've decided to take up the mantle of actually using this blog to document my attempts at being a really real grown up artist type on her way to finishing her MFA and trying to make art and teaching my career. This isn't an easy endeavor, but perhaps this attempt at paying attention to the process, tracking myself and my endeavors here will help it all feel more real.

I'll start, I suppose, with the project that I am most directly involved with at the moment, and then go from there. The next few posts will be dedicated to describing it in detail and trying to get myself closer to being able to describe it in the context of my education, my life, and my beliefs.

Here's a basic description of the projection from my website.
It is called:
Mary and Sarah and You and Me

Mary and Sarah and You and Me at the International Toy Theater Exhibition

Catch a glimpse of the performance/film/puppet collaboration "Mary and Sarah and You and Me" at the International Toy Theater Festival. May 23-30