"No Holds Barred" and an Artistic Epiphany.

Yesterday I visited the New England Quilt Museum with my mom and our neighbor Linda. It was the final day of the No Holds Barred exhibit, and we were fortunate to attend.

The exhibit was beautiful, and was comprised of an array of artistic contemporary quilts, all complementary in style. One of my favorites is shown above: Daybreak by Ann Brauer. Though called "daybreak," I couldn't help but envision the many sunsets over Buzzards Bay I've seen with Ted over the past year. It's difficult to see in this photo, but the quilt had one single strip of cloth colored the bright yellow-gold of the sun, while all the other colors seemed to react around it, just like the sun fading into waves at nightfall. A beautiful piece, and one full of movement.

Viewing the quilts in yesterday's exhibit, I became overwhelmed with the desire to create. For some time now, I have been working on producing a piece in which surreal landscapes are projected onto a cloth on the floor, as a dancer (or possibly a group of dancers) performs a solo interacting with the image on the ground. For this project, the audience would view the performance from above. Looking at today's quilts, I realized that projecting quilted landscapes (whether literal in imagery or abstract) would be the perfect medium. My concept is to bring texture and 3-dimensionality to the light shining on the dancer, and what better way to do this than to project images of tactile art quilts onto the performer below.

I am not yet sure what the final result of the project will be. Certainly, I image setting up an outdoor balcony from which audience members can view the piece from above, as if looking into a fish bowl. On the other hand, I have forever been fascinated by the movement quality and imaginative settings of Stacey Steer's Phantom Canyon (seen below).

As a result, I often picture this project as culminating with a film in which the performer becomes a central character, following a subtle narrative. For this, I would prefer to work with each frame individually, to produce a halted movement quality similar to Phantom Canyon, and thus making the dancer appear to be a character within a children's book, rather than simply moving at a normal pace. My aim is for the surreal to become reality.