Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, Big Sculpture Garden

Overall the festival and the Big Sculpture Garden went over well. We at the sculpture garden had a rough beginning as we all were a little behind and were still attempting to finish things Friday evening when the storm rolled through. The last bit of paint I applied to the large icon hadn't dried by the time the rain came, which meant that the very last parts I painted washed partially away in the rain. The large icon then had a weathered look to it. It meant that I was up in the morning installing the rest of the installation (see bellow), and that other artists were also finishing up their pieces on Saturday. By Saturday night the garden had completed feel to it, with a couple of artist working on their pieces as "live art." "Live art" i.e. artists working on a work of art as people visited the gallery spaces, was something that was happening all over the festival, though in the sculpture garden while Andy had assumed some of the artists would be working on their art during the festival, it had not been planned who would do so. John Bambino who neighbored my piece actually finished his painting as the festival was winding up on Sunday.

My installation was well received. I talked with many people about it, and I heard back from one of the organizers of the south end of the festival that many people were talking about the installation. We had a good crowd at times, though most people walked through and did not stay and listen to the bands and acts who were performing, so that bit of the garden may have felt less than successful for the bands and organizers of the performance part. The space was great when all the pieces were in place and the feel of it all especially on Sunday was inviting and interesting space.

Here are some photos of my piece and the Garden most I think taken on Sunday.

Big Sculpture Garden: so much to do so little time and then Rain

This has been and continues to be a wild week. And it got even more exciting as I finished the large Icon just as the storm was upon us. though due to the rain I still have not put up the full installation. Which is a little disappointing I at this point want to be done. Also, I am not completely satisfied with the large icon, though this is largely because this is the first architectural sized work I have ever done, and painting on canvas in the wind is just plain difficult, and it was windy most of this week when I was out painting. But it is good.

Here are a few images of some of the progress on my icons and iconostasis and at the site this week.



Blurry but I kind of like the photo.

A few Days ago, blank canvases on site
The Big iron rebar sculpture by Andy Delarosa, Other artist began hanging stuff on it, stained glass ceramic etc. Thunderstorm kind of put a damper on working on putting up stuff, as you probably can imagine. Iron spires and lightning.

Just about to begin painting, see jar of paint on the ladder.


From across the parking lot that is the site of the Big Sculpture Garden.

Art Festival, Conferences and Hermits

The Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is 4 days away (well 4 1/2 as the festival begins at 4 pm Friday). I am somehow not freaked out about that this morning. I have a great deal to do still on my installation art piece not the least of which is to write the largest Icon I have written on site. I think, I hope the mural space has been constructed will find that out in a little bit. Writing the two icons last week went well and Kate says it went fast, it did not feel fast but I will need to probably work both quickly and long to finish the mural.

Given the time this takes and all I have wondered about whether I should have taken this on. Are there other things I should have been focusing on, or doing. There certainly are other things. I missed the Ekklesia Project Gathering, which I and one or two people from Reconciler were thinking of attending this year. I always think of going, and never have. I don't go to conferences generally. About every other year I attend North Park's Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture and once made it to *CINO's Practicing Resurrection (the first one actually). I am actually a little puzzled and overwhelmed by the number of conferences there are in the various circles I am in. I don't know how people make it to conferences nor why it is such a priority. This isn't a criticism, though somewhere there may be a critique of conference mentality. Of course if I were in the Academy I would be attending the conference(s) of my respective discipline. AAR and SBL for Religious Studies and Biblical and Theological studies, yet as a Religious Studies major and the seminary student never attended.

What I do instead is something like the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, or try my hand and making a movie one summer (as Kate and I did the summer of 2005, and having spent the previous year writing the thing with some friends). I am prior of an intentional Christian community and pastor a small church, maintain some semblance of relationship with pastors in the Edgewater neighborhood, and currently trying to establish a relationship with service providers for the mentally ill and homeless. In all of this the place of art in faith and my life as a pastor and prior, the role of the local church coming along side service providers etc. is enough to keep me occupied and with enough to theologically cogitate and mediate on without going to a conference to hear about other peoples thoughts on other possibly related subjects and experiences. Don't get me wrong a very large part of me wants to do just that. I want to engage others talk about what is going on hear what others, and yet I just can't be bothered, it all seems like so much noise and distraction.

A friend of mine pointed out when I expressed some of this that conferences are the way a privileged affluent culture communicated with itself. Conferences are ways we communicate and network, we let each other know what is going on. It has it pluses and its downsides. This lead me to think more seriously about a thought that came into my head as the Ekklesia Gathering was going on and that same friend was tweeting the conference and I was wishing just a little that I was there: I am a hermit, a new hermit perhaps (something along the new monasticism). I say this partially tongue in cheek, but there is something here. This thought was elicited by reading on the blog Mystagogy that a certain hermit on some Island in the Mediteranian one the Greek Isles I think, is spending his time restoring a building (that either was a monastery or the hermit is restoring for the purpose of it becoming a monastery), the hermit works on the building and apparently also hangs with the local villagers, who love the hermit. Something about this seemed analogous to my experience as the Priestly Goth, who is pastor and prior, does crazy things like agrees to be part of the Big Sculpture Garden at the Milwaukee Avenue arts fest and wanders about Chicago. I am building something, preparing a space for others. Often it feels like that, others who are yet to realize they need or want the space perhaps. The difference though is actually some are already there, and then there are the villagers, the fellow goths and artists who I run off and do things with from time to time. I need to focus on these local tasks, this singular and lonely tasks, like being in the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival. Reconciler isn't there, I alone. I have invited members to connect with this but this is a solitary task, I don't understand it entirely, not sure what or why, except that when I was asked, there was no question that I was supposed to do this.

So maybe I am a very odd hermit, a hermit in a city who is also prior and pastor. but there is something solitary about this, something that I also invite others into, something I am called to build for others. But saying that seems a little nuts, but are hermits ever sane? I don't know.

Progress on Icons for MAAF: Iconostasis and Highlights

as part of my installation I am creating a sort of iconostasis, or just the most basic kind for the two icons I have been writing. Bellow are the frames, on site or before I will finish them. There are also images of the icons in the frames. The icons are getting close to done but still have a ways to go.

Progress on Icons for MAAF: first layer of paint

Fuerza Bruta

Saw Fuerza Bruta: Look Up last night. It is an amazing and incredible show. The audience and performers are all on the stage. In many ways it much more like a really good and incredible night at a dance club than my sense of theater. It was odd to be lead up to the stage and see the Auditorium theater empty, and for a moment to look out from the stage up into the seats of the theater. The Auditorium theater was not built for this sort of thing. If you were to design something for this type of theater I guess you'd design some combination of a warehouse club space and the stage of a theater.

The show opens with light and wind coming from either side of the stage alternately and then appears a man walking on a conveyor belt set on a raised piece of staging. A series of events unrelated but related in a dream like sort of way transpire as the man runs and walks, gets shot, passes through crowds, sits at a restaurant, sleeps, carries his own bed. The rest of the show had women on harness walking and somersaulting on a shiny curtains, and a point where the actors interacted with the audience hitting some people over the head with "boards" of Styrofoam and confetti, that lead into a dance party overseen by a DJ in powdered wig and military coat whose appearance conjured up images of George Washington. So a George Washington DJ. The Show concluded with four women cavorting in a shallow pool of water made of some form of clear plastic suspended overhead. We watched them from below.

The show meandered through dream scape, interactive happening, dance party and circus spectacle. Nothing that I saw I had seen done before, and the special effects the technical aspects, the endurance and performance were all flawless and amazing. All seemed oriented toward evoking emotion and having an immersion experience without referent. On the other hand I also felt that it was simply an extension not so much of a performance art piece or Theater, but of the night club. Over all take way the technical aspects of the special effects and the overall experience emotively was that of a very good and special night at a Goth club. But then in this I am looking for more than the creators intend as the playbill essentially discourages looking for a meaning, though it also seeks to interpret itself as simple reality.

As amazing as the show was I am in the end disappointed. Disappointed not in what it was which was amazing but in that it failed to be the more it could have been. The style of theater lends itself to comparison with the Blue Man Group, which I think is a fair comparison in term of genre, if one can apply a genre to either performance theater group. When I saw the Blue Man Group I left the theater seeing the world differently, the buildings and streets I had walked just 2 hours before were the same but i saw them differently. I saw Kate differently, and I looked at my life and seminary differently(I was at North Park Theological Seminary at the time). With Fuerza Bruta I was to experience my self in relation to what was going on. There was nothing outside, nothing other than a sequences of experiences in imitation of a dream (which don't get me wrong is pretty cool in and of itself, but that is all it is) that means nothing and thus changes nothing and asks me only to see the world and myself as I have always seen the world and myself. Or worse it asks me to escape myself and the world and how i see the world for the moment we were enclosed on the stage.

Fuerza Bruta is meaningless. It showed us bodies without meaning, a desert of life in stark beauty, momentary emotions and fleeting experiences. It was decadence devoid of any and all transcendence and it was an amazing experience. I am no different for the experience and it is fading rapidly in my memory as this day has passed. It is an empty experience a desert of artifice. And despite the insistence of the playbill that there can be reality with out referent and interpretation, it was not real, but an exercise in futility, a dream without symbol. That might be the very point, a celebration of the decay of symbol and meaning as what is "real". Such a view of the world and art and theater is for me in the end then without life.

Icons For the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest

Last week I began work on the two smaller Icons for my installation art piece for the Big Sculpture Garden at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest in Logan Square.

(initially forgot to put in the link, it is there now LEK)

Today I begin the first layers of paint on the icons. Here they are in their initial stages. I had wanted to use actual gold leaf, but it turns out Dick Blick store near me doesn't care real gold leaf in the store, you can only order it on line from Dick Blick. I couldn't afford overnight and couldn't wait for shipping time, so composite gold leaf it had to be. I am though pretty happy with this composite gold leaf it is still harsher than gold, but it is pretty good imitation of real gold. Also, since for a variety of reasons mostly logistical I am painting these in acrylic paint, and not using egg tempera, which I usually use when writing icons.

Mother of God Galaktotrophousa

Christ Pantocrator

Both Icons together in my studio