Open Engagement no-go

Another rejection:

Dear Angela,

This year Open Engagement received nearly 300 proposals and we spent nearly two weeks thoroughly reviewing all of them. The selection committee greatly enjoyed these submissions and truly wishes that it were possible to include all of them but to do so would simply exceed our capacity. The committee was forced to make tough decisions and were unable to accommodate many esteemed and valued colleagues.
Unfortunately this year we are unable to accommodate your submission. We strongly encourage you to apply again next year. Part of the spirit of Open Engagement is being able to create an event where we can take care of all of our participants; part of that includes housing, meals, and transportation once in Portland. With that said the number of individuals we can accept is very small and we are unable to take on many proposals that we would have loved to include in this conference.
Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your work with us.
All our very best,
The Open Engagement planning committee

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Open Engagement
Making Things
Making Things Better
Making Things Worse

May 15-17, 2010
Portland, OR

The Marks We Make

I thought the description of the current exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town to be interesting:

‘The Marks We Make’ seeks to explore notions of mark-making as expressions of territory, violence, memory and/or play. The show will look at ways in which marks are used to claim territory, and to assert ownership, as well as the violence that often accompanies such markings. It could also look at the marks that are left behind – both physically and psychically – and the role that marks play in our personal and collective memories. Additionally, drawings often form part of a larger creative process, in which the drawing acts to inform the final work, but simultaneously exists as a work in its own right. This process is often quicker, freer, less constrained, and thus perhaps moving into the realm of play.

Meditation as Action as Drawing as Performance

Meditation action - sitting on top of Rosenclaire's "Soapboxes" in front of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town South Africa. Beading the phrase "not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act". Glass beads, silk thread.

Action in collaboration with "Strengths and Convictions" exhibition, commemorating the lives of the four South African Nobel Peace Prize laureates. November 30, 2009. Duration: 1 hour

Rest of Alphabet

cleaning hair and dust off the bathroom floor

cleaning the windowsill

clearing the crumbs from breakfast

collecting crumbs from lunch

collecting lint off darks

leftover ginger bread crumbs and sawdust

picking up a quote on scrap paper

picking up what sticks from the carpet and polishing the table

reusing a torn tea bag

rubbing dust off the stove vent

sweeping dust off the shower door

sweeping studio/garage floor

trimming dress threads and lint

wiping chalkboard dust and flour

wiping dust off the dryer

wiping dust off the fan

Open Engagement revised

draft:

To/From Mothering Alphabet project is two-fold. One to present a new alphabet, made up of 26 symbols correlating to 26 mothering sounds from labor. Each symbol would be installed in an intimate nook around the city of Portland. A correlating map would be handed out for pedestrians to walk the city as a journey down the birth canal, along the way experiencing sounds of natural labor.

The choice for particular sounds of mother in labor are; to bring the intimate space of birth into a public setting, to have a woman’s experience be heard/have a platform and to invent a new language using maternal sounds as a basis of communication. At the end of the journey the public/participant will have the option to project/exhale/moan/shout/cry their sound upon an open public space, perhaps over the Willamette River. Their sound will be recorded, continuing to build on this language.

What I am thinking about for Open Engagement

An Other Alphabet- To/From Mothering Alphabet

Performance, Presentation- Teaching the sounds of the mothering alphabet
I pick up one symbol at a time, project it through an overhead projector onto the opposite side of the installation space onto a white screen. I pronounce one letter at a time, asking the class to repeat after me. Each letter/symbol represents a sound from labor.

Meditation as Action as Drawing as Performance

November 30, 2009
Meditation as Action as Drawing as Performance
Performance on Rosenclaire's Soapboxes, in front of the South African National Gallery, in collaboration with its current exhibition Strengths and Convictions, which honors the four South African Noble Peace Prize winners.

Meditation performance creating the piece "Not To Speak Is To Speak, Not To Act Is To Act".
The intention behind the Morse code pieces has transformed from simply presenting them to performance work that incorporates the process as integral to the final object created.

This is to reveal the common threads between meditation and everyday actions.

Performance stills

video stills
Meditation performance (Meditation as Action as Drawing as Performance)
November 30, 2009
Performed on Rosenclaire's Soapboxes
South African National Gallery
Cape Town

work in progress: Open Engagement

Please let me know what you think - is it clear?
Would love some help
x

Open Engagement statement draft

For the upcoming Open Engagement, slated for May 2010, artist Angela Rose Voulgarelis proposes an interactive performance piece entitled Airing Dirty Laundry that aims to facilitate communication in new and unexpected ways.

An actual laundry line will be drawn in a public place, in front of which the artist will spend a portion of each day sitting and embroidering texts onto bed sheets – which she intends to then hang from the line at the end of each day.

Next to the artist will be a transparent ballot box, ballot cards, and pencils – this will be to exchange and collaborate with the public. Passersby will be asked to fill out the cards with the pencils provided and place them in the box. The texts from the cards will be what the artist will then embroider onto the sheets; the pencils will be offered as the exchange.

The choice to perform an everyday action in public rather than in private is in and of itself a way to intervene in space: it interrupts ideas of ‘acceptable’ civic behavior. To combine it with the playful yet thought-provoking notion of “airing dirty laundry” also aims to encourage people to share stories and life experiences they would ordinarily keep to themselves. This will, in turn, bring to light what we as a community tend to neglect: our own interconnection. Through the meditative repetition of an everyday activity, it is the intention of the artist to transform the notions of personal suffering into more universal empathy.

It would be a pleasure to perform Airing Dirty Laundry at the Open Engagement event this May 2010.

Thank you in advance for the consideration.

Insomnia

Ciao darling,
Just arrived back from Cape Town.
Insomnia has set in.
Working on Portland statement and application now.
x

HAPPY NEW DECADE

May your decade be filled with love, love from everyone around you.
May your dreams be fulfilled.
May you find delight in all that you do.
And enjoy a peaceful mind.

See you in May...

Children Speak their RIghts

South African children summarize their rights for the twentieth anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of The Child



Shot and edited by Eva Gilliam for Unicef South Africa

seeing dust

the particles we all are.

What do we define as waste? When did this definition begin? Did consumerism accelerate/generate it? What do we throw away and why?

I am seeing the waste as potential art. I love seeing dust in this way. It is like seeing the particles through the sun's rays for the first time and believing its magic.

titles

wiped flour from pie dough

vacuumed dust and hair

sweeping dirt and dust

swept studio floor

collecting dust and spiderwebs

sweeping dirt

sanded postcard dust

collecting lint

from mother/to mother alphabet- project 1

sweepings on cut-out contact paper, dimensions roughly 5x8" each

Each projects to life-size via a projector. I hope to have 26 of these, each one standing for a letter. As I was working today I jotted the following notes on the symbols meaning:

It is about having these motherly (loving) relationships with everyone: giving support and being supported. -

-so what kind of environment would support this kind of interaction?

-for example: what song brings you comfort? what sounds in general? what smells?

-can you make a gesture of support? that would support another?

-can you make a gesture of being supported?

(It does not have to be in the physical, figurative realm. How else might this interaction manifest? Can the projection somehow include the viewer's body?)

Journey and the thoughts along the way

marking time in space (can be erased and redrawn- original text is in pencil)

start: crates, containers, moving slowly

planes landing, slowly, cycling (I'm reminded of my returning)

"Welcome aboard"

landscape- origin of term? ownership?

continuous motion, presence/absence

"I'm here," I say on the phone. Here where? In the land,

many miles from you.

red of the trees disrupts my thinking, one big wall
It's quiet, slow, pleasant, drawn out horn
I'm imagining Washington's coast but I can be anywhere, nowhere
(mothering is/as a landscape, no one owns it.)

"Train attendant, Harold..." Earth divided: pumpkin field, golf course, count American flags

left view so different from the right- for an instant vast space, passing train

gray clouds hang low, a blue patch

riding on the shore, overhearing conversations

homes on stakes, destruction inevitable

(when ripped apart from one's child, there is a sensation of a body part being pulled away.

"It's good for her, she will learn." She is fine now, but the tears in the eyes are no illusion.

I have carried her since my mother's birth- cycle of 50 years.

"I want to go on the train too!" She would enjoy this ride)

"Don't put your hands in your mouth." Hygiene, smell of others

Houses blanketed with leaves, is that some body's home?

get the impression of the land, land Washington?, in language

smell of lunch permeates the car, french fries

dirt dangling off a shoe "Don't have to worry 'bout my mind & goin' home."

The train moves without me, someone shoots the train

homey smell of french fries, is it homey or just a smell?

cows! I'm embedded into the land

sounds: cell phone, bubble gum pop, low tones of conversation

America, decapitated houses, it's raining

I remember this town, the cottage, the shack

are we riding slower or faster than we drove?

I have too much food "Could you help me eat them?"

old folks wave "Bye, Bye," the cars rock

write legibly (need to be read, ALOUD/ALLOWED)

"Someone else's heart pumping someone else's blood & walking arm in arm..."

it is a continuous missing, thoughts of her fade but never quite get away

she's such a fascinating being, and we are utterly interconnected

more thoughts escape now

things pass by

notes are slight

collapsing structures

who's dumb idea was this?

Boredom sets in, industrial landscape, trash

I just ate trash, soggy swiss and ham, ham questionable, smells like it but does not taste

nighttime is harder- what was I trying to escape? & trade for this boredom, this immense time, for what?

to sit in no space, facing my fears, I'd rather fold laundry

I know I will like the sunrise, but that is twelve hours aways! what till then?

bodily functions are under control, "PATIENCE"

always in the middle of the process there is a problem

freight train is broken

when train is still???

Awake to an awaking California!

What a night! stuck behind a freight train in the middle of nowhere, Oregon

for hours

lost much hope

changed that slightly by learning a few cords on the guitar

teacher, a bluegrass player

A stop, I loose track where. Through Ani conversation on landscape- understanding it as scape

something one sees, objectifying it. (possessing it?)

On a train that does not (the picture) exist.

it is continuous, not ending, no rectangle

where does the art end? ever changing, never ending

pace, pace of the train, slow, peaceful

12:30 reservations in the dinning car

how much do I need to consume? how much money do I need? how much energy does one need sitting down?

logs turned into blocks

bee hives, planes, hawks & birds on a wire, electric lines

"dreamin'"

collapsing structures, can see for miles, cranes

jogger on a road in the middle of the land

Americans walking off fat, "We can't do nothin' but sit back and relax"

The train has stopped,(again), so has my mood

the sky is lovely, the sun pierces through clumps of clouds

sadness flooded like the rain of Portland, but it does move like the weather- soaking, pouring, drying

I keep recalling the second leaving, where it was my choice

that responsibility for my sadness floods me

cycle

movement feels better than stillness

there is comfort in things going by, no preciousness

delayed writing, why this mark making?

It's not about arriving, necessarily, it is about the process in getting there

(but really sometimes you just want to be there already!)

one wastes allot of this 'open' time, one does not need this time

bursts of two to four hours, yes, but 36-40, no.

Nothing is ever still, ducks swimming, cows feeding, Canadian geese stretching their wings

flocks of ducks take flight

cow with calf, bull wades in water, drinks, am reminded of Cedeberg animals

what grace!

train- a state of (indirect) non production