Glue-Guns and Post-it-Notes

When a theater company acquires a piece of performance (adds it to their repertoire) it is with the knowledge that the work is to be performed again someday. They will reference the past variants/instances when discussing the current but there is an understanding of moment. Performance is a discipline built on moment.

Moment is also present in painting, sculpture, architecture, and other material works which are often separate from the body(s) that created them, able to stand or hang on their own. It’s a different type of moment. A collapsing of time into a space followed by a slow release. The world before it was made. The world while it was made. The world while it exists. Picture a fly and the time a fly has on earth compared to a tortious. The fly may only have three days of light and dark, but those three day may stretch out and feel like forever. While a tortoise lives for 80 to 120 years and at first their time will go slowly but as they age time will feel like it’s flying by as their concept of it responds to how long they have been alive.*

A performance exhibits it’s “moments” well. We can recognize right away without having to think about it that this event won’t last forever. We came to a place, witnessed a creation, and when it’s over we will leave and only have a memory. A material work of art mean while,  has the slower timeline as it’s more visible component. We feel intuitively that it could possibly outlive us. Or at least out last the evening. This slower timeline is often confused with immortality.

A script, a notation, manages to stretch a performanative work’s timeline. To make it elastic. The language, structure, and any stage direction or explanation of setting are aligned with the memory of past moments to enable it to be handed onto the next generation.

A material work of art relies on writing and reference to achieve as well. Records allow us to look at the moments to see the perspective of one person and their interaction with the object. We can look back through time and out at any place the object has traveled and through reflection see it’s moments.

Really the forces at play in all these things are the same, it’s only a question of proportion. Writing, film, and other time based art works display both their moments and their slower timeline equally well which gives them a marked flexibility.

All of these things have value. None is better than any another.

*I am not a scientist, a fly, or a tortoise, these ideas are not backed up by expert knowledge, and merely illustrate a point. I am also only able to reflect the human experience as it relates to myself so take all of that with a grain of salt.

— Gina R Furnari

Bibliography

Beasley, Kevin, and Fred Moten, On Poetry and The Turn Table. Triple Canopy, https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/on-poetry-and-the-turntable. 2015, accessed Nov. 20, 2019.

I didn’t know the name of this place when I arrived. I know it by the pier just visible from the highway and the islands of Cedar? Spruce? Pine? That stand among the Reeds. Low light is best for taking pictures of it from the road when the clouds are low, and the light is an even blanket. Today the light was bright but the soft brightness of fall.

From the pier, I was surprised to see so much water. The view from the road is almost all marsh, but here I finally understand how boats get around. The water was deep blue and burgundy brown but clear on the edges letting me see straight down. I wonder if that’s what it’s like in the middle? How deep does it get? Where does this water go or come from? What lives below the surface and in the marshy edges?

Something moved in the waving grasses - probably a bird or a turtle - possibly a snake. I recorded sounds of seed pods rattling and wind wheezing past.

At first, I was disappointed that the reality of this place didn’t meet my expectations from the road. It’s so much grander - more open than I expected. There’s a road that curves around this place and dead ends near a private driveway and a large grey lake house. When looking for the pier, I first ended up there. As I turned around on the gravel and dirt road to go back the way I had come I thought about how quickly development ends here. The most populated state in the union but 2 minutes off the parkway the roads turn to dirt, and there is water, and there is life.

“Vitamin D: A Pep Rally For Spring,” 2018

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”

—Solnit, Rebecca. “Grounds For Hope.”

What actions do you take when you want to build up a community, improve the place where you live, or make meaningful connections with the world around you? What do you do when it’s 20 degrees below Fahrenheit and winter feels like it will never ever end? If you are Alyssa Baguss, you throw a party or more specifically a pep rally to usher in spring and warm things up. Alyssa’s  “Vitamin D: A Pep Rally For Spring,” 2018 was a part of “Illuminate South Loop” a three-day creative placemaking festival created by the City of Bloomington, Artistry, and Northern Lights.mnin in the lead up to the Super Bowl. It featured cheerleaders and a drum corps and was a simple act of defiant joy.

Our class of Nomads met Alyssa Baguss at Silverwood, an art-focused public park in the Three Rivers District of Hennepin County, Minnesota that she helps run. We were there as part of a class with artist Amanda Lovelee called Art and Place Reconsidered. Both women are part of a tight-knit group of socially engaged artists in the Twin Cities. Alyssa and pretty much everyone else we met in Minnesota, mentioned how deeply cold the area can be and I realized seasonal depression in a place with this much winter must be hard to contend with, the immense amount of joy and humor in her work relates directly to the realities of living in this place.

In another of her works titled HB2U:MIA, Alyssa created a voluminous spatial installation out of a multicolored parachute (a giant version of the kind I and many others played with in elementary school). Taking a theme, in this case, Minneapolis Institute of Arts’s 100th birthday and running with it, she accompanied this enveloped spatial experience with birthday cake sculptures ready for decorating. Alyssa’s practice is play-based and impulse-driven. She makes space for creatively focused experiences that are for her enjoyment and the community around her.

Silverwood Park, Hennepin Co. Mn    

Bethel University. Archenteron, Silverwood Park, Hennepin Co. Mn

In her other life at Silverwood, Alyssa Baguss is the Artist and Arts Programming Coordinator. The park is a relatively new suburban open space focused on encouraging an understanding of nature through art and art-making. The trails have poetry stops and contemporary sculpture nestled into wooded areas, bird habitats, and along the water. There is an artist-in-residency program for writers and an onsite gallery. As programming coordinator, she manages a team of full and part-time staff members to create events and classes, works with artists, and the broader community to build meaningful connections around the environment.

Oceanic,2018 Folded photo wallpaper mural

While we were in Minneapolis, I also got a chance to see some of her installation work at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. These drawings were created as part of a set of new works for the Jerome Fellowship. They are large and beautiful digital depictions of place and space folded like origami, so they move into three dimensions. The works depict the outside world, vast expanses of water and earth, but they feel made only for interior space. Oceanic, 2018 was the first piece I saw when I walked into the gallery, and it floats like an ice-burg reflecting in the speckled highly polished floor. These remind me of rainy-day activities, plans for future adventure, or sets for imagined ones.

I’m impressed with the balance she’s able to maintain between her individual practice, where one participates with one’s community but is personal in nature, and Parks or institutional work, which is service driven and collective in nature. Each piece informing and influencing the other, time made for each.

I live on the east coast of the USA in a pretty rural (relative to things here) town in Southern New Jersey called Mays Landing. There’s a lot of creative placemaking that goes on in other parts of the state and especially in nearby Philadelphia, where between organizations like Philadelphia Contemporary, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and the city government there seems to be a new event, park, or festival every day of the week with a high focus on contemporary public art. I grew up in New Jersey but, I’m pretty new to Mays Landing, and I’m still getting to know this place. I’ve met a lot of people who participate in committees like Friends of the Park, and the historical society and they run some pretty wonderful programming but turn out to things is still really low. The town itself has about four big community events a year and based on anecdotes from friends and family the turn out for those is going down too.

One thing I took away from this trip was that everyone we met manages to make things happen and a huge part of that is the community of artists and educators and how well connected they are to each other. There seemed to only be two-degrees of separation between everyone we met with, and that’s if they didn’t already know each other.

Another is that I’ve had vague ideas of how to start creating programs and things here before we went to Minneapolis but, after this trip and spending time at Silverwood, I think there’s a need to look deeper into my interest in the parks here and my understanding of nature. As part of Amanda Lovelee’s class, we listened to an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer where she said: “…attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.”It’s about the way children look and through their wonder can build relationships with the world. It’s something I try to keep alive in my work when I research and paint but not something I’ve thought to include in my collaborative projects, not something I thought to share.  

Gina Rafaella Furnari, Untitled, 2015; Watercolor on paper 

You know that episode of Scooby-Doo where the fog is so thick Scooby slices a circle out of it with a knife? That’s what I think about when I remember driving trough Skagafjörður, high up on the edge of Iceland, sitting in a cloud. I was glad to be a passenger and not responsible for keeping us on the pavement. The ground was visible only a few feet in all directions, and all I could see were those bright yellow reflector polls that indicate the edge of the road.

We’d missed this part of the north on our last trip to Iceland, as we’d never ventured to this side of Siglufjörður. I spent the drive dreaming of riders on horseback pulling up out of the mist and greeting us before falling back to a parallel world. For long moments we moved together in silence, the rider matching our speed and rhythm. There was no direction to go but forward, the world had disappeared beyond the narrow road.

In a minute the lights of a passing car flashed. We shuttered, and the rider moved back into the mist. Soon the clouds parted revealing the ocean and villages below.

I had many moments like this throughout our drive back to Reykjavik. A hazy rain cloud would settle in, hit us with forceful winds, spit giant droplets of water or a wall of mist, and then disperse dramatically, opening up to columns of sunlight. I hurriedly photographed everything I could. We pulled into Point-of-interest spots along the way, repeatedly jumping out of the car for views of crashing waves, farmsteads, and waterfalls.

At Háskólinn á Bifröst we ran to the top of steep steps surrounded by lava moss that was still mostly frozen along with last years remaining bláber (tiny edible blue berries that grow like ground cover). Realizing how cold it was we ran back down to the warmth of the car. Pushing to stabilize against the force of the wind.

It’s amazing how driving from one city to another with no real agenda other than to get there eventually can feel like an epic adventure.

The rental car had to be turned in before midnight and I had hopes of dinner, but we had a bag of cardamom flavored doughnuts called Kleiner in the car and at least one more rest area to hit before the long drive around Hvalfjörður. We’d found on the drive up the day before that the tunnel Hvalfjörðargöng was out which, had meant an additional 40km or so of driving around the edges of the fjord while our GPS yelled at us to turn around.  

We stopped to eat in Borgarnes feeling a slight sense of déjà-vu. All the N1 stations feel pretty much the same but I’m…80% sure we stopped here the day before. I wouldn’t have attempted this drive anywhere else, but Iceland feels familiar and it’s open in a way I can only assume the Western United States must be. There aren’t many forests but patches of them spring up here and there surrounded by sundrenched peaks. Everywhere I go here feels like a movie set. Light forming the most dramatic effects it can and land shifting and changing to create small pockets reminiscent of landscapes I’m used to, but not the same at all. The openness creating an illusion that tricks me into thinking distances are shorter than they are, and making objects appear smaller.  

Yesterday in Snæfellsnes we passed tour groups on horseback no-doubt inspiring my visions of such things in the fog today. We drove for hours and hours on gravel roads until our new white car was covered in dust and mud as we made our way around the peninsula and back to Rt 1.

At the end of the day’s drive we were rewarded with the snow covered peaks that announce Akureyri. We’d walked the streets of the city and found our attachment to it hadn’t faded with a nearly two-year absence. It was quiet and beautiful and fittingly the weather in May felt like a mirror of how weather in September had been. We ate in a restaurant I’d wanted to try for a while and promptly fell asleep in our hotel with views of the parking lot, a slight sprawl of houses, and the mountains in the distance.

Today we’d already done almost as much as the day before. Visiting friends in Ólafsfjörður, followed by a quick stop in Siglufjörður to grab more coffee before making our way around the northern fjords and back down to the southwest, and eventually Reykjavik.

We’d set out knowing that this trip would be mostly driving. There was no time for whale watching or bus excursions just a quick stopover to see more of a place we love with very little planning.