Month: November 2016

Mother Horse Eyes: “Shadows Sneaking Between Trees”

Photographer Unknown, (On the Edge of the Forest)

“Sometimes late at night, I heard singing. It came from outside, out there in the far distance, from somewhere in the deep forest beyond the boundaries of my world. Some nights it was one voice, but usually it was many, singing a strange, aching song. It sounded like a haunted crying. When I was little, I had whimpered and cried like this to my mother. But who was crying out there in the night? What kind of dark mother was listening?

When I first heard the singing, I was filled with a blood dread. The hair on my back bristled, and I growled and barked at the darkness. Even after the night finally went silent, I trotted around for hours in vigilant anger. Later, as I heard it more often, I learned to accept it with a sullen unease. Of course, this singing was the sound of wolves howling, but I didn’t know this in the dream. In the dream, I’d never seen a wolf in my life.

One winter, I began to see them prowling in the woods. To me, they were ghost dogs, shadows sneaking between trees, eyes glinting in the twilight. I growled and barked at them, but didn’t pursue. For several months, they never encroached on my world.”

― Mother Horse Eyes, The Interface Series

Kiran Ahluwalia and Timariwen, “Mustt Mustt”

Kiran Ahluwalia and Timariwen, “Mustt Mustt”, 2011

Kiran Ahluwalia is an Indian singer, songwriter who infuses African desert blues and Western musical styles. She was born in Patna, grew up in Delhi and moved to Toronto at the age of nine. After completing her MBA at Dalhousie University, she returned to Toronto with the plan of being in the financial services industry. However, she changed her mind and went back to India to study music and then returned to Toronto to build her career as a musician. Kiran Ahluwalia is married to guitar player and co-arranger Rez Abbasi, and currently lives in New York.

Tinariwen (Tamasheq: “deserts”) is a Grammy Award-winning group of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. The band was formed in 1979 in Tamanrasset, Algeria, but returned to Mali after a cease-fire in the 1990s. The group first started to gain a following outside the Sahara region in 2001 with the release of “The Radio Tisdas Sessions”, and with performances at Festival au Désert in Mali and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Fabienne Verdier

Paintings by Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier is an abstract painter who explores the dynamism of forces in nature, movement and immobility by drawing on her intimate knowledge of techniques and traditions of both Western and Eastern art.

As a young art school graduate, Verdier left France for China in 1985 to study the art of spontaneous painting and other Eastern traditions with some of the last great Chinese painters who survived the Cultural Revolution. Her adventure and immersion as an apprentice painter would last nearly ten years, recounted in her 2003 book, ‘Passagère du Silence’.

Verdier paints vertically in ink, standing directly on her stretchers, using giant brushes and tools of her own invention suspended from the studio ceiling. Her work combines Eastern aspects of unity, spontaneity and asceticism with the line, action and expression of Western painting.

Notes: Fabienne Verdier’s website, which includes several videos that present her exhibitions and follow her work process, is located at: http://fabienneverdier.com

Insert Image: Fabienne Verdier, “Color Flows 3”, 2012, Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Kendall Buster

Sculptures by Kendall Buster

Kendall Buster is a full-time faculty member in the sculpture and extended media department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her large-scale “biological architecture” projects have been exhibited in numerous national and international venues. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as part of a series on art and science and was the recipient of a 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Arts.

“Sculpture can expand beyond the idea of the making of a distinct, autonomous object and into site-responsive installation,” Buster said. “The way I work tends to engage architectural spaces, often using a variety of materials that may not be permanent, and so there is this wonderful opportunity to do all kinds of things with scale, play and volume.”

A native of rural Alabama, Buster began her education in the sciences, particularly biology and microbiology, which inform her work today.

“A lot of these pieces have accessible interiors and operate like models that transform a given architectural space,” she said. “And there are certain kinds of references to what we think of as the language of biology in that many of the materials I use really do resemble a membrane.”

Juan Zelada, “Breakfast in Spitalfields”

Juan Zelada, “Breakfast in Spitalfields” from the EP “What Do I Know”

Juan Zelada is a Spanish singer, songwriter and musician. Raised in a musical family environment, which consisted of jam sessions throughout the different generations, his talent and love for music flourished.

In 2006 he completed his studies at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, where he received an award for composition from Paul McCartney who called his recording a “smashing cd”.

Having moved to London, he set up a band, while still playing in restaurants, pubs, hotels and even cruise ships. He played the London scene to great acclaim and supported Amy Winehouse on her Back to Black tour.

In 2012, Juan Zelada released the single “Breakfast in Spitalfields” which became a national success being the most aired single on BBC Radio 2 only second to Adele.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Rebecca Bathory

Photography by Rebecca Bathory

Rebecca Lilith Bathory is a British photographer, living in London. As Rebecca Litchfield, she is known for her series “Soviet Ghosts”. She graduated from University for the Creative Arts with a first class degree in Graphic Design in June 2006. Between 2008 and 2010 she studied for a master’s degree in Fashion Photography at The London College of Fashion, for which she was awarded a distinction. In 2014 she was awarded a Techne scholarship for a research PhD degree at the University of Roehampton to research the photography of dark tourism. She graduated with a PHD in Visual Anthropology.

Finding beauty in darkness, poetry and meaning in the forgotten and surreal, imaginary worlds amongst decay. Rebecca Bathory’s artworks breathe life into forgotten historical locations, they reawaken old narratives, find beauty and meaning in their ruin and revive the memories of lost moments in places tainted by the indigenous.

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Lisa Gerrard, “Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow”

Lisa Gerrard, “Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow”, 1995

“Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow” is a song co-written in September 1993 by Lisa Gerrard and composer/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Claxton during rehearsals in Ireland for the 1993 Dead Can Dance international tour. Lisa Gerrard stated she wrote this song as she was missed her family which had remained in Australia.

The song’s first public performance was in Sligo, Ireland. It first recorded on Dead Can Dance’s 1994 live album “Toward the Within”. “Sanvean: I Am Your Shadow” later was included on Gerrard’s 1995 solo album “The Mirror Pool” and the 2007 “The Best of Lisa Gerrard”. Like most of her work, the song is sung in a euphonic and emotional pseudo-language which she developed in her early years.

“I sing in the language of the Heart. Its an invented language that I’ve had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.” –Lisa Gerrard

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Ernest Haeckel

Lithographs by Ernst Haeckel

“Kunstformen der Natur”, or “Art Forms in Nature”, encapsulates biologist Ernst Haeckel’s response to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Haeckel  published these exquisitely rendered depictions of flora and fauna in ten installments of ten illustrations from 1899 to 1904, aiming to widen the general public’s understanding of naturalism.

Haeckel also clearly saw his illustrations as more than just scientific documentation. In introducing one of his plates, he wrote that its patterns would not be out of place in embroideries or on urns and bottles. Haeckel’s elaborate forms have been called a precursor to art nouveau, and his influence even stretched to architecture.