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You are here: Home / Archives for Chris Ezzell architect

Miya Ando, Piper Leigh, Butoh and Chado at ArtXchange

October 30, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

“With swordmaking in Japan, you wear all white, you cleanse your soul and purify yourself. The transferral of the energy goes directly into this object. On the handle of the sword are these Buddhist prayers and Buddhist deities. The sword only has one function, and it’s a violent function, but the creating of the object is done with this reverence.”

This quote from Miya Ando carries all the strength of contradiction that made last Friday’s Butoh and poetry performance at ArtXchange riveting and unforgettable. Entering the gallery, I was drawn immediately to the main room where Ando’s paintings in cast metal hung on the walls in stately sequence. They invited what I would describe as serene shock: the body knows it is confronting hard, cold metal, and yet the eye falls into thin air, cloudspace, the sumi-black forests of Bolinas. From panel to panel the delicate atmospheric grays of photography alternated with pure abstraction to arrive at complete, resolute stillness. The surfaces had been etched, burnished, sanded, dipped in resin, mysteriously transformed by human handcraft into something beyond human. The rigor and discipline of these pieces reflect Ando’s childhood, growing up in a temple in Japan, in a family with a long tradition in the art of sword-making. 

 

MiyaAndoLandscape
(Photos courtesy Miya Ando)

Above them and throughout the gallery, shimmering kimonos drifted suspended from the ceiling. Visiting Santa Fe poet Piper Leigh creates these kimonos from pale silk and embeds words and images in the translucent fabric. For this evening she collaborated with Butoh artist Jyl Brewer (Shinjo), and two musicians to create a performance piece that traveled through the gallery and into the teahouse designed by architect Chris Ezzell.

The performance began with readings from Leigh’s new book of poetry and photographs, “my thin-skinned wandering,” just out from Tres Chicas Books. This title phrase, taken from the first poem, “A Dilemma of Transparency,” seemed particularly apt for the dance of Butoh, with its barely shielded body and the self made so vulnerable: shimmering and half-hidden, cloaked, clothed, naked without and within.  

(Photos, Piper Leigh)

The teahouse itself was a marvel, entirely constructed of recycled plastic bottles. From a distance it almost looked like what it was, but close up and illuminated the plastic became abstract, unnamable, perhaps white birch bark or alabaster.

PiperLeighInstallation
Photos © Piper Leigh

 

TeahouseSculptureArtExchangeGallery
Photos, Iskra Johnson

(Photos, Iskra Johnson)

Much of the performance took place inside this translucent curtain, and I could only catch fragments. My mind drifted. White silk reflected in the stainless steel on the walls. Metal mixed with thread, shakuhachi became piano in a temple where I slept one night in Koyasan Japan, in monsoon season. I had awakened towards midnight, disturbed by wind and strange music. I slipped into the hall and downstairs I saw, cast on a white shoji screen, the shadows of a family gathered around a piano. My mind hovered there on the temple stairs and in the rainforests of Mt. Koya. I came back to this world only in glimpses, when the kimono flew through the air and shuddered for a moment above the smoking lamp. 

Tea Ladle
Photo, Iskra Johnson

I was completely taken with the entire evening, but especially with the depth of Piper Leigh’s sure and imagistic poetry. We met up later at The Panama Cafe and talked at length. Piper is not only a writer, but a photographer and a maker of books. She creates installations that take shape as mobiles, scrolls or kimonos or cloth. As founder and principle of Comunica, she is deeply involved with interactive learning design. She describes her work as committed to inspiring a “culture of connection,” of which the evening at ArtXchange was a wonderful example.

Filed Under: Art Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: art and tea, ArtXchange evening of Butoh and Chado, Chris Ezzell architect, Miya Ando at ArtXchange, Piper Leigh poetry, Reviews of Mya Ando, reviews of Piper Leigh

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Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?
I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.

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