To Be or Not To Be?
photo collage
It has been wonderful to be ‘just’ an artist for these weeks! See, my
vacation from being a Director/Curator and from teaching was to be a full-time
artist during four of the six-week run of my trio exhibition. The gallery has a
talented Curator of its own who did a terrific job blending our three different
styles and media together. I had nothing to do with the hanging other than to assemble
my two multi-part works. That’s a real vacation!
The exhibition is still ongoing, though my vacation is over and I once
again have to divide my time and shift my focus from just my art to exhibiting
other people’s and teaching. However, we three co-exhibitors are still going in
almost daily as Artists in Residence. We have done so since the exhibition
opened to the public for I proposed that for its six weeks, we each create individual
work publicly in a room adjacent and connected to the gallery. We will present
it and a related performance piece publicly at the end of the exhibition in a
week or so.
My first experience of this kind as a visual artist was when I was a
Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta, Canada) participant. I originally went for a
month in August of 1983, but thanks to grants, spent the next year and nine
months there in the fall, winter and summer studio programs. I believe the
format has changed since then, but at the time, summer meant we participated in
a series of workshops and winter and fall were each a three-month period of working
on our ideas or collaborative projects and receiving studio visitors, attending
lectures, presentations, performances, exchanges, tours of the region, doing sports
activities, and so on.
For each session, we were ten in the Ceramic department. We each had our
own workspace in a shared open studio where we could create at our leisure – so
called since there was nothing ‘leisurely’ about it. While we worked, people
attending conferences of all non-visual arts kinds could come by and see what
we were doing, usually at restricted times so as not to be too distracting. Many
participants found it difficult to concentrate on their work, because there
were so many distractions in fact: so many choices to make daily about
activities, so many interesting people, both famous and not, to meet or
collaborate with, and so much to see of the natural environment!
My studio space faced a huge bank of windows. I would often go there
long after supper (deliciously prepared in the main dining hall) when most
other participants had been lured by some evening activity or other. What distractions
could there be when humans were elsewhere? Herds of elk. They would gather as
evening fell on the well-tended and spacious lawn outside the windows, thirteen
to fifteen strong. Man, they are beautiful!
Nature was a huge presence in all our psyches. The mountains of the
Rockies chain surrounded us majestically on all sides. It would be pitch dark
in the am and suddenly the sun would clear a mountaintop and there would be
spectacular light! Or a group of us on the roof of the Sally Borden building at
some late hour would oh and ah at the incredible Aurora Borealis display. Or
I’d be sitting alone on top of Tunnel Mountain listening to the howl of wolves
in the distance, or walking along followed by a curious, noisy flock of magpies,
or squatting patiently by a path to watch a coyote watching me before deciding
to cross in front of me and disappear into the brush. How full can a heart get?
Sleep? Who cared! I worked at night to concentrate but also because the
day was too full of amazing opportunities to miss any of them. Besides the
eye-popping environment, guest artists came regularly to each department of the
Banff Centre, Dance, Musical Theatre, Music, Creative Writing, Photography,
Painting, Fibers, Ceramics, Film and Video… I wanted to hear or meet them all,
maybe get to work with some of them. I met Margaret Lawrence and John Cage,
John Roloff and Dennis Oppenheim, Rita McKeough and Nancy Cain, Anthony Braxton
and Vera Frenkel, Bob Arneson and Michael Lucero, Gene Youngblood and many others.
What a thrill to have many of them visit my studio and respond to my work!
This was the unique thing about the Banff Centre experience, the
cross-pollination among disciplines. Not all artists had time or the
inclination to venture outside their medium or technique, but those like me who
did were richly rewarded. I discovered through the artists who came to give me
critiques and share their creative and life experiences with me that all arts
are bound by the same procedural and conceptual frameworks, that inspiration
and imagination function the same way whether one is composing for violin,
building a wooden structure or taking photographs. To whatever degree and no
matter how symbolically coded as image, sound or pixels our creations are, we
all work from the deep core of who
we are and what we’ve experienced that opened our eyes to the world.
Besides the nationally or internationally known artists, I also met
fascinating fellow participants doing all manner of creative work. My
background in theater, dance and story telling came into play when I acted,
danced or read for other artists, but they also allowed me to conjoin
medium-based elements with performance-based elements, adding movement to
drawings and voice to sculptures, for instance and learning to begin bridging
the gap between usually stand-alone disciplines.
I also got to curate exhibitions, help re-build a wood-burning kiln, dance
madly at parties with relay good dancers to improvised music by really good
musicians and trek up and down mountains for art events, careful all the while
not to damage the incredible variety of tiny, delicate and susceptible plants
growing in the tundra. The audiences for all these things were always engaged, attentive
and intelligently responsive, and my co-creators when we collaborated were knowledgeable
participants from all over the world.
What an experience I had! In its scope, accessibility and variety it
probably will never be repeated. If those twenty-one months at the Banff Centre
with professionals and other pre-professionals in all manner of artistic and
creative disciplines taught me anything, it is this: artists who don’t ever
have the chance, even if short-term, to devote themselves full-time to their
practice and process, who can’t connect with other artists in different
disciplines as peers, who don’t have the opportunity to have serious, ongoing discussions
about their and others’ intents, meanings and achievements, and who never
venture outside their own techniques, these artists are severely deprived in
their personal development.
The experience taught me to understand in a professional sense why I
make art, why I make the art I make with the mediums I use, and how to make it despite
all the distractions and difficulties. I wish all artists had the opportunity
to have similar experiences, say in an artists’ residency somewhere, preferably
where Nature is one of the participants. Or, if they can’t leave home, to
create mutually supportive or collaborative projects that bring in people in
other disciplines, and carry them out publicly. The challenge is invaluable.
Other than the work in studio itself, I found that there is nothing
better for my artist’s soul than to have had the experience I described above
and I try to carry its spirit into all art projects I create today.
