Love Will Tear Us Apart, Invitation Image, Copyright 2011, Ana Gagliardi
Please join me Saturday May 7th for a stimulating exploration of images and ideas, choreographed by Ana Gagliardi:
http://getgoodspace.net/GetGoodSpace
The show consists of eighteen diverse photographers collaborating on: Love will keep us together/Love will tear us apart. I have asked the photographers to create an original image in keeping with the theme, translating as they understand it. They will not view one another’s work until the installation. This is an opportunity to create a group mind examining consequence, patterns and relationships.
In a 2008 essay for Orion Magazine, Bill McKibben wrote:
“Research has shown that when we live on car-filled streets our number of close friends drops by half. We eat half the meals we used to with friends, family, neighbors… our clothes come through the ether from the mysterious geography of Lands’ End. We don’t need each other anymore, and that’s the saddest thing we’ve done — sadder even than the scourge of climate change, which at least is anonymous and impersonal…The big question for this century may turn out to be how fast we can relearn the skill of neighborliness.”
My objective is to initiate community and connection for fellow artists who bring to life new insights and further questions: Where are we going? How did we get here? What do we need to do to change? How does change affect us? How can we live with difference and dissonance?
This show is about stories: how we see, what we feel, how the world is shaping us or how and if questioning and creativity are transposed to and transforming the social sphere.
Speaker: Susanne Sklar, a William Blake scholar, currently living in Wisconsin and emigrating to England late May for Oxford, will speak at 5 pm prior to the opening. Her subject of scholarship and book: How Beauty Will Save the World, a topic both engaging and transforming. I’ve provided this link to a CBC radio program featuring Sklar and two other artists. Please listen, it’s powerful stuff, about 50 minutes long and can be downloaded as a podcast.
“Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn proclaimed that beauty will save the world and this essay explores how Blake’s prophetic writings reveal how beauty transforms individuals and societies. Beauty need not be a commodity, a thing to be craved. Beauty can be about perceiving the divine in every thing, and such spiritual materialism can engender social justice…The beauty of peace can reveal the interconnectedness of all things.”
-John Hopkins University Press
7 pm-10pm. Saturday May 7th at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, 1136 N. Milwaukee Avenue, just south of the Division and Milwaukee intersection.
The Painter Ryan Shultz with wounded hand. Copyright 2003, Stephanie Dean.