invitation

http://eriksanner.com/random/2010/bronxartspace/life_mapping_and_summer_shade_invite_100302.pdf

life mapping and summer shade will be included in the synthetic zero group show of live performance, experimental film, and visual art curated by mitsu hadeishi at bronxartspace in march 2010.

justin, david and i will be live mapping only on wednesday, march 3rd, on and off from 6pm-9pm. ruthie, star of the video component, may make a cameo appearance sometime after 8:30pm. i hope you can join us!

if not, i‘ll also be there on saturday, march 6th, from 7pm to 8:30pm, hanging out and witnessing the performances and taking in the other projects in the show.

bronxartspace is located at 305 e. 140th st., #1a, bronx ny10454, right around the corner from the 3rd ave / 138th street stop on the #6 train. http://www.bronxartspace.com/mar2010.php

i hope that you can come by and see life mapping, summer shade and the other work – and i hope that you enjoy it when you do.
































how did you come to this place in your life? what brought me to art, to painting, to collaboration, to new media, to living in new york city, to showing in the bronx? life mapping is a conversational, collaborative method of action painting in which overlapping webs illustrate turning points in the lives of the participants, culminating in the present moment and location.

the life maps began with footprints in freshly-fallen snow. participants imagined the snow as the earth and walked from place to place, city to city, country to country, sharing memories from each spot on the map, trying to find out what led us forward each time. when the initial life maps were complete, new animated life maps were drawn on a computer and projected onto the life maps we made in the snow.

on wednesday, digitally-combined footage of the experience of creating all of the previous life maps will be projected onto the wall. the area within the projection will represent the world, and the collaborators will then create new life maps by affixing colored tape to the wall. life mapping gives a relatively succinct, painterly answer to some questions asked over and over by generations upon generations of artmakers – where did we come from, and how did we get here?

































summer shade is the final of four seasonal landscape “moving paintings.” each of these pieces seeks to convey my impression and experience of a time of year. although they rely on video and computer programming in order to change through time, each of these pieces is meant to be “looked at” like a painting rather than “watched” like a movie.

summer is all about relaxing, lying in a hammock... i wanted both the process of artmaking and the final piece to provide that feeling. my plan was to go to a park and film tree shadows on a portable movie screen. projecting the captured sunlight and shade back onto the screen in a different context would bring an outdoor summer sensation inside, in any season. above you can see sketches from that original plan.

after relocating to a new apartment with a patio in the back, i was able to sip homemade limeade while my video camera recorded peaceful moments passing, just as i had hoped to do in the park. every few minutes i moved the screen and the tripod, capturing different compositions. a breeze flowed through the tree leaves and the sunlight dappled on the screen, forming patterns of light and shadow.

after recording the shade, i wrote software which composites different moments of the footage, intensifying both the deepness of the shade and the brightness of the sunlight. due to the length of the video which can be composited and the variations of the shade patterns and the location of the screen, you’ll see a slightly different composition every time you look at summer shade.