NEW YORK CITY, 17 March — In the roller coaster of life, soaring ascents are often followed by plunging descents, and so it was today for Vaneeesa Blaylock whose bombastic performance last week of Net / Work was today counterpointed by a simple act of contrition, a day of silent meditation in hopes of making amends with some of those her relentless career ambitions have turned into collateral damage on her race to some artistic vision out there somewhere.
VB35 – Like A Prayer
Gallery Xue / NYC
17 March 2012
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I hurt a couple of friends recently, not intentionally, it’s just so easy to do sometimes. In my “drunk walk” of trying to find a path, of trying to tell a story of art as a virtual experience that’s powerfully explored by avatars, as I’ve stumbled I’ve kicked a few people. Realistically I probably won’t be perfect from this day forward, but I wanted at least to take a “time out” to seek forgiveness, to stop running and breathe for a moment, and perhaps to remind myself of that Allan Kaprow lesson that I seem doomed to forever relearn, and forget, and relearn, and forget… that art can be so simple, and that the simple, fully lived, deeply experienced, can be remarkable. Not exactly that “less is more,” in a Mies van der Rohe kind of way, but simply that the smallest moment, deeply experienced, can be so sublime.
One of those I sent a notecard of atonement to, Skygirl Kline, contacted me this same day. We haven’t spoken for 538 days, since 25 September 2010, and it turns out we’d each felt a recurring guilt over those many days. It was liberating to make amends.
It's kind of ironic that even in my attempt to make amends, to be less selfish, that I wound up upstairs in the gloriously heated gallery, and Xue sat the whole morning on the dock "freezing my ass off."
VB35 – Participants
Agnes Sharple
Botgirl Questi
Bumblebee (Wendz Tempest)
Canary Beck
Carissa Arthurine Somerset
Eva Marie
Fuschia Nightfire
George Coghill
Ironyca Lee
Jeremy Owen Turner
Joseph DeLappe
Kathleen Cool
Katie Vizenor
Krista Hoefle
Kristine Schomaker
Lizzie Gudkov
Aero Bigboots
RMarie Beedit
Marmaduke Arado
Isabella Medici
Nadya Tolokonnikova
Nathan Shafer
Pixel Reanimator
Ravanel Griffon
Scarlett Luv
Strawberry Singh
Tabitha Raincloud
Toni Tyldesley
Trilby Minotaur
Vanessa Blaylock
Xue Faith
Yordie Sands
Ok, not so unusual to see me on my knees 😛 But it is a true rarity to find me in prayer. Wow love these photos, lighting and sepia tone really create an aura of piety. Nicely done.
Thanks for being there. As an atheist, or a “fundamentalist atheist” even, I never really imagined doing a performance that involved kneeling / prayer – but it felt right.
Yes! The lighting at Gallery Xue / NYC is really fantastic. We have Xue’s architect Delilah Buscaylet to thank for that, she designed a marvelous space that makes such powerful use of glass, glass block, and simple awning treatments.
And thanks for the photo comment, I am happy with these images. It’s funny, for me, painting is so much about color, and photography is so much about tone. So I love paintings that, as Yves Klein once wrote in his storyboard for the short film “War Between Line and Color,” free themselves from the tyranny of line, and let color blossom forth.
But for me, the analogue to unbridled color in painting, is a celebration of tone in photography. So just as I appreciate paintings that let line get out of the way, I appreciate photographs that get the overly hot, seductive powers of color out of the way so we can appreciate the tonality. And with the light at GX/NYC this can be so powerful.
I also think that virtual space is over-saturated generally in color. So even in full-color images, I like to desaturate the images a little or a lot. I feel it makes them more real or less “cartoon” like.
It was fun going the other way and creating “painterly” hypersaturated images for VB34, and now I do love the sublime restraint of these VB35 images.