GRAY AND WHITE DAYS (Experiments in the Tatra Mountains)

Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

a-TreeTestTwo637A4941.jpg

Most of our days in Slovakia are spent in the far south in the hometown of Gabriela’s mother, Chl’aba. But each year we journey three and a half hours to the north to visit the national parks of Slovakia. Most often, that means a trip to the Tatra Mountains, an extraordinarily tall and beautiful range of mountains. Or really two ranges. The High Tatras straddle the border with Poland and rise above the treeline, often requiring rock scrambling or holding chains to reach the tallest peaks, like that of Krivan, which is the national symbol of Slovakia. The Low Tatras, majestic in their own right, form a parallel range further south, across a beautiful valley of small villages. These are a bit more human in their scale, but the highest peaks are also rocky, cold, and desolate.

Photographing the landscape is perhaps one of our most difficult challenges. The dilemma, quite simply put, is how to portray the natural world in a way that isn’t immediately recognizable and therefore easy to dismiss. In a year when more than 1.3 trillion photographs will be taken around the world, this is a problem for photography in general. But photographers like Penelope Umbrico have already called attention to the incredible glut of repetitive landscape photographs that become almost indistinguishable from each other. Thus, we need innovative strategies that don’t immediately register and that cause the viewer to take another look.

Atlantika Collective worked hard to develop an alternative aesthetic in our ongoing joint work on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, which is accessible here: http://atlantika-collective.com/gallery/. The two of us have also shared experiments from the banks of the Danube River in Chl’aba here: http://atlantika-collective.com/blog/2017/8/6/red-and-blue-days-experiments-on-the-banks-of-the-danube. Given that we are soon to be located near the Black Sea and several major rivers in Ukraine, you can expect interpretations of the water in Eastern Europe as well.

But in the Tatras, we turned our attention to the trees. The Tatras are home to expansive forests, dominated by Norway Spruce, that have suffered from repeated calamities in recent years. In 2004, huge sections of the national park was hit by a massive windstorm that toppled more than 30,000 acres of trees. Since that time, there has also been an outbreak of bark beetle disease in the forests. And sadly, it seems that some are using these natural disasters as an excuse to log perfectly healthy trees in the national parks, an outrageous outcome that is apparently tolerated by Slovak policy.

On this latest trip, which included day-long hiking trips through the Western part of the High Tatras, we encountered much beauty but also many toppled and diseased trees, along with ample logging. We experimented with different ways of depicting both the beauty and the calamity facing this ecosystem. A few of our experiments are included here, and we invite your comments on whether these images may inspire what we felt: inspiration from sweeping natural beauty, grief from the devastating losses accelerated by humans, and hope that the landscape may still be able to recover if we intervene in time and in proportion to the crisis.

,

Village Life Along the Danube

,
oszirosza_01.jpg

We’re continuing our 6 week sojourn in Southern Slovakia, along the Hungarian border, before we move to Ukraine. This is a region of small, rural villages in which contemporary and historic influences coexist in an uneasy patchwork. In the last two days, we helped the women of Chl’aba clean the village church, took a long walk along the Ipel River, which together with the Danube forms the border with Hungary, and took a bus trip with the choir to the nearby village of Letkes, where they performed folk songs in traditional dress at the yearly village festival.

The experience in Letkes was particularly surreal. The women performed their songs early in the program of the festival, then were joined by a Slovak-Hungarian sitar band for musical accompaniment. Up next was a Hungarian pop duo whose upbeat songs inspired an eccentric couple to dance wildly and french kiss near the stage while the audience applauded. (The man later kissed Mark on the neck; the woman sat uninvited in Gabriela’s lap; and they both refused to believe that we didn’t understand their language.) Then a Hungarian heavy metal band called Crazy Granat started its screeching warm-ups, sending the choir and the rest of the Chl’aba contingent scurrying back onto their rental bus.

The Chl’aba choir is an example of a key generational challenge facing Chl’aba and other rural communities. The choir is overwhelmingly elderly, and the women don’t know how much longer they will continue performing. The next generation is absent -- in part because working age people are drawn abroad for better opportunities. While there are some children who perform, there aren’t enough to replace the older generation, and thus no certainty about whether local folk traditions will be preserved.

In this post, we’re sharing some images from Letkes -- images gathered in support of our long-term project, Returns, which documents village life in Chl’aba and also focuses on several generations of Gabriela’s family. Our eventual goal is to create a book that captures all the intricacies of this village and its environs.

, ,

RED AND BLUE DAYS (Experiments on the Banks of the Danube)

, ,

Greetings from Central Europe, where we’ve begun a year-long adventure  that will have multiple components, including a photo/video Fulbright project, learning about and reporting on contemporary life in Central and Eastern Europe, reconnecting with family, and exploring family origins.

Our first stop is Chl’aba, Slovakia, the hometown of Gabriela’s mother, and the site of a joint project we’ve pursued for almost a decade. Called “Returns,” it’s a very intimate account of village life along the Danube, with chapters that dwell on different generations and try to come to terms with the tragic and unexpected loss of Gabriela’s father and other family members in recent years. We’ve collected a voluminous amount of photographic and video documentation of Chl’aba over ten years, so much that it’s hard to fit on a burgeoning array of hard drives. One key goal is to turn this material into a book, and we hope to make progress on that this month. It’s also likely that Returns will never come to a complete close as we continue to visit, document, and improvise.

In terms of the latter, Chl’aba has become ground zero for experiments on our documentary approach and our aesthetics. On the one hand, when we get here, we’re usually ripe for relaxation on the pebble beaches that line the Danube River. On the other, we quickly get itchy about image-making. While sitting on the banks of the river the last several years, we’ve explored a plethora of new approaches to image capture, many of them centering around alternative (and sometimes found) lenses and alternative surfaces. That process is continuing this year, with a burst of new images that we hope are pushing the boundaries in terms of what one expects to see in a photograph or a video. We’re living in a world that gives birth to more than a trillion photographs per year, so when planning to gestate new ones, it’s a good idea to make sure they have something new or special to say.

We’re sharing a few of the latest experiments today, in keeping with the spirit of Atlantika, which embraces transparency on process, and also in the hope of getting some feedback. We’ll share more as the summer continues, and it will be interesting to see if they influence our approach to the Fulbright in Ukraine (which will begin in mid-September) and our work more generally. We invite you to react, reply and become a part of an “Open Circle” of collaborators who are informing our work in the coming year and beyond.

 

IG_Chlaba_05 copy.jpg

The Geography of Creativity

Bill Crandall

It’s interesting how obsessions that have directed the course of my life - and my art - have always been about culture intertwined with place. As I’ve felt somewhat alien in my own country for much of my adult life, usually 'place' meant somewhere else.

London

With friends on Carnaby Street

In my teens and early 20s, London was everything. The mother lode of just about every cultural touchstone that mattered, especially musically. In high school I went there on a school trip - which for me was more like a pilgrimage - and was hooked.

So a few years later I picked up and went there with a guitar and too-few bucks. My band at the time, Modest Proposal, had been offered to play at the famed 100 Club, so we all went and I tried to stay on.

Modest Proposal at the 100 Club

The record label guy who got us the show, Mark Johnson, was also managing The Sharp, a band which was basically The Jam minus Paul Weller, with Jimmy Edwards on guitar and vocals. Mark said he was going to try to get me in on second guitar. The Jam’s drummer Rick Buckler was in attendance at our 100 Club gig, and one afternoon we got to hang with him at his London recording studio, Arkantide. Unfortunately, Mark clearly had other, um, personal designs on me as well, so that all evaporated pretty quickly when he learned I didn’t roll that way. I was 20 years old and, suddenly, completely alone. It was just too hard, soon I was back home. (Years later we heard rumors Mark had died of AIDS in Morocco or someplace. There's a pretty extensive thread about him on this mod revival forum from a while back.)

A few years passed and I tried again. My longtime friend and mod-mate David T had moved to London for his PhD, so I took a fall semester abroad, which was really just a cover for trying to get a band going with David.

A couple dudes who auditioned with David (right) on his balcony in Primrose Hill

I was living in a one room bedsit in north London, with an electric meter I had to pump with 50p coins to keep the heat on. The band never got off the ground unfortunately. As the weather turned colder I remember being riveted to a crappy little TV in a friend’s freezing flat, watching what would become known as the Velvet Revolution in Prague. I thought about going there, as I was getting more into photography and it seemed a golden opportunity. But I was headed home to the US in a matter of days, and my mother was coming for a visit, so I didn’t even try. Probably best, I was way too green.

Prague

Around the same time I was reading Milan Kundera and poring over the photography of Josef Koudelka, tapping into new physical and psychological terrain via art. My cultural compass was shifting east, especially with the London yearning seemingly tapped out. While I missed the Velvet Revolution, by 1991 I was in Prague teaching English. Never in my life had I felt such affinity with the textures, smells, sounds, and general vibes of a place. Communism was gone but the ghosts hadn’t cleared out yet and globalism hadn’t arrived. There were few tourists. It was that in-between period, when things were gorgeously rough and all seemed possible.

I learned some Czech, met a girl, went back several times over the next few years. The girl didn’t work out in the end, maybe I was more in love with the place. I remember thinking of the city at the time as feeling like a comforting, motherly embrace. The complex sensibility of the people - unsentimental yet warm, understated but with that dark humor, without some of the American excesses I disliked - made a deep and lasting impression. As did Czech photography and photographers that I met, which became hugely formative influences. I began to understand the link between sensibility and being an artist. On one hand I used to think, well, damn, once again the dreams didn’t work out. But they did in other unexpected ways. I’d go so far as to say that Czech people helped make me the person I am, and Czech photography helped make me the photographer I am.

DC

Starting a family obviously grounded me at home in the US. Not without some leftover wanderlust, if I’m being honest. So I kept going, when I could. From Prague’s maternal lap I hopscotched to the Baltics, the postwar Balkans, Belarus, and other parts of Eastern Europe.

In Riga (left) and postwar Kosovo

Of course I was making photos, that was a big driver along with basic curiosity. But I also still had that almost primal urge to situate myself in a different place, to breath different cultural air, even if I always snapped back home in the end.

My daughter in her bedroom

Finally, with a young daughter and a ‘normal’ job, I found a way to work photographically with what was right under my nose in DC. But while I was feeling more invested at home, I couldn’t shake the sense that maybe all I was doing was projecting my Eastern inclinations onto my hometown. Maybe it was wishful art-making, seeing what I wanted to see.

Tove Jansson's sketch of herself with the cast of Moomins characters she created.

But soon there was a shift again, this time to the north. My fixations began to skew toward the Nordic countries, and as always, dovetailed with their cultural creative output. I love Finland’s Tove Jansson and her Moomins stories and art. She knew something about wishful art-making: as a lesbian, anti-fascist artist in WWII Finland, she constructed the Moomins’ humanitarian paradise partly as a rebuttal and antidote to the ugliness and despair of wartime.

There was Denmark’s bike culture. The Swedish film Let the Right One In, such a beautiful and atmospheric thriller. Iceland’s music scene, beginning with Sigur Ros like most people but there are so many more. I find it perhaps the most creatively fertile region at the moment, but that’s a different post.

As I became less restless and more concerned with making the art I needed to make, these became new inspirations. And while the north pulled at me through its creative ambassadors, I felt I could tap into them without needing to be there, it was almost enough to let them live in my head. I discovered the evocative soundscape approach and new musical vocabularies of bands like Sigur Ros and Norway’s Royksopp. Suddenly, after many years away from making music, I started having ideas again, new ways of assembling a palette of sounds, melodies, and song structures. This helped lead to my 2016 solo album New World Voyage, a concept album that imagined the first people to leave Earth forever for a distant planet.

So maybe heading East made me a photographer, and looking North resurrected me as a musician. As I work on stripped-down acoustic versions that I can manage playing live, and new songs for the followup record, I find that, finally, maybe I’m turning to my own country for inspiration. (Lately I do find myself listening to more Jackson Browne than I ever thought I would, does that count as a guilty pleasure?)

What’s hard though is finding current American musicians pushing the envelope, going beyond genre, in ways I find as satisfying as what Nordic artists like Jonsi, Pascal Pinon, and Farao are doing. So I try to do it myself, to bring some of that into my own work as I tried to bring Eastern Europe into my photography.

As my friend and mentor the great Czech photographer Viktor Kolar - who himself has a tremendous affinity for place, in his case his industrial hometown of Ostrava - told me, if you have a vision and are able to create, then you have a duty to do so. So much of that vision has been shaped by where I've been, where I've been drawn to like a magnet.

, ,

New Video: Songs in the Key of Free

, ,

Previously, we've shared some still images from a project called “Songs in the Key of Free.” Now we're sharing the main product of our work -- a video that showcases the extraordinary songwriting and performing talents of incarcerated men in a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania.

The program, which is the brainchild of August Tarrier and Miles Butler, ended a period of about two decades in which music programs were unavailable at State Correctional Institute – Graterford, which is about 45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia. After repeated visits to document these exceptional individuals, many of whom are serving long sentences or even life without parole, we became very attached to their passion, their humanity, and their commitment to do everything possible to make the most of their situation. In fact, our work on Songs engendered some of the strongest emotions of any of our experiences working on incarceration issues. That’s because the many men who we met inside were so warm and giving — and so grateful for the opportunity to express themselves through music.

Fortunately, their talents were highlighted at a concert inside the prison, which is available to view on Facebook Live, and subsequently in an outside concert in Philadelphia at the Painted Bride. In the future, the men’s original songs will be available in an album. Moreover, the Songs in the Key of Free will begin serving women in a downtown Philadelphia prison in Fall 2017.

Please check out our video — as well as the still images available here — and let us know your reactions. (Please note that prison regulations in Pennsylvania forbid us from showing the faces of those who are incarcerated.) And also please consider supporting Songs in the Key of Free in their work, which relies mostly on the help of volunteers to date. There is no question that this program is embracing and preserving the humanity of those involved — something that is sorely lacking in most prison environments in the United States.

,

Impact of Incarceration on Families Highlighted in ZEKE Magazine

,

The work of Atlantika Collective members Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac, focused on the impact of incarceration on families and children, was published in ZEKE Magazine. This project, titled "Locked Apart: The Koger Harris Family," is one chapter in a series of documentaries that focus on the impact of incarceration on families. More than 2.7 million children currently have a parent in prison, and children missing their parents are seven times more likely to get involved with the criminal justice system themselves. You can check out the full story here: http://www.zekemagazine.com/forum/incarceration/locked-apart-the-koger-harris-family

, ,

The Faces of Music on the Inside

, ,

Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

“We shall overcome. We shall overcome. We shall overcome, some day….” This song always tears on the heartstrings, no matter who is singing it. But when it’s sung by musicians inside a maximum security prison, desperate for a taste of freedom and a link to the outside world, it becomes plaintive beyond words.

We’ve both spent many years working on issues related to mass incarceration. But recently, we worked for only the second time inside a prison. We were invited to join a program called Songs in the Key of Free, which is conducting a series of workshops at State Correctional Institute-Graterford, about 45 minutes outside Philadelphia. Philadelphia-based musicians, some from the Curtis Institute, are working with musicians at Graterford on improvisational songwriting and musical performances inside the prison. Later, the songs will also be performed in a public concert in Philadelphia, and our job will be to represent the men on the inside through a multimedia presentation.

One of the imperatives in working on incarceration is to represent the humanity of those who are incarcerated, since the criminal justice system does so much to deny them their dignity and individuality. But this is made more difficult by prison regulations that forbid showing the men’s faces. Our task becomes that much harder, and we have to use a variety of unusual techniques to capture their warmth, humanity, and encompassing love of music.

Songs in the Key of Free is focused in part on the healing power of telling stories in song. As visual storytellers, we are honored to be a part of the team that is helping participants use the power of their stories to transform and heal their lives. We’ve witnessed firsthand the enormous potential of those who have made mistakes to make a fresh start and bring talent, skill, and passion to helping others.

Here is a first glimpse at some still images from our work with Songs in the Key of Free, which will also rely heavily on video. We’ll have more work to share soon, since we travel to Graterford again in early March. We welcome your feedback.

New York is Beautiful

Bill Crandall

I just got back from a few days in New York City. For a long time I never knew what or how to photograph in NY. I didn’t want to do what had been done before, and didn’t really have a better idea, so I didn’t shoot at all. But slowly I’ve been chipping away at it for the last few years, the working title of the body of work is New York is Beautiful. More on the title later. This latest installment from the trip is not really representative of the project as a whole, but it was liberating to go a little crazy with a simple analog effect (suggested by one of my students) that actually articulated some of my evolving thoughts and responses to the city. Including that tension between beauty, brutality, and a sense of ever-impending apocalypse.

Smithsonian Magazine: American Incarceration. Photographs by Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

For the past six years, Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac focused their multimedia storytelling on the negative impact of mass incarceration. Most recently, their projects highlight the plight of children whose parents are in prisons or jails. More t…

For the past six years, Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac focused their multimedia storytelling on the negative impact of mass incarceration. Most recently, their projects highlight the plight of children whose parents are in prisons or jails. More than 2.7 million children in the U.S. have an incarcerated parent and approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives.

Separation due to a parent’s incarceration can be as painful as other forms of parental loss and even more complicated because of the stigma, and lack of social support and compassion that accompanies it. Children have difficulty visiting their parents and often lose contact. Black children are seven times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent. 

Smithsonian Magazine recently published a selection of Gabriela's and Mark's photographs from their ongoing project "Locked Apart: the Impact of Incarceration on Families": http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/everyday-struggle-child-parents-incarcerated-180961438. You can also view more of their work here: http://gabrielabulisova.com/

 

,

How’d You Get a Gig Like That? - Part I

,

Music at a photo festival
With two collaborators I did a live music set at FotoweekDC. We live-scored a projection of photography from New World Voyage, my music-photo hybrid project that came out over the summer (see mistochord.com). It’s a story of sorts of the first space colonists at the moment of leaving Earth, knowing they won’t come back. It was interesting how the balance of photo and music components jostled for attention and importance. Is it a slideshow, a concert, an art project? The album download comes with a PDF booklet of images, but in some ways the live format better integrated both elements into an immersive whole.

Hey, that sounds cool, how does one get a gig like that?
Well, in my case, doing the hard work over an extended period of time, against all odds and battling through all kinds of uncertainty and limitations. Doing things and building on them to do other things. I recommend remaining flexible, open, and yet stubborn in your creative approach. Have ideas and chase them, but don’t be afraid to go where the path takes you. I’ve always played music in bands, but this is material that is totally new for me, ideas I didn’t have twenty years or five years ago. I left a good and successful indie band, Dot Dash, to pursue those ideas. And yet for a fair stretch of time it really wasn’t working, until finally it was. So that’s what I mean by stubborn.

Bringing it to the micro-local level
The next night we had a cool listening/watching party in my DC neighborhood, Petworth, in the small venue called Third Floor above a diner. This was a different 40-minute video version (that I finished editing and exporting about 30 mins before doors opened, I think I got a ticket on the way back to the venue...) accompanying the full recorded album, plus Q&A at the end. Nice little turnout and very grass roots, some people lying on the floor on pillows for the screening. The event again made me realize (along with the live version) that the material is most powerful when all the elements are together - the music, photos, and even the writing I did to flesh out the story, in the form of the crew’s communications back to Earth. Now I’m thinking where else to take both formats, live and prerecorded. I’m thinking the whole spectrum from living-room listening parties to theater-scale projections with live score. Some new possibilities are already in the works.

How did you hook that up?
By being active both in my work and in the community, and a bit of karma. I’d become friendly with the guy that owns the Third Floor and a number of other local establishments. A while back I took some photos when his family closed their long-running art space downtown and moved their various businesses to Petworth. I took them for myself, but gave them the photos gratis as I knew how momentous it was for the family. Recently he offered the Third Floor as a venue for a listening party so I came up with ideas on how to do it. Not really a quid pro quo in the sense of either side expecting anything, more like what goes around comes around. Which might not get you ‘into the art world’ but is not a bad approach to building *your* art world.

You work for months and even years on projects that have no guarantee of coming to fruition. But then suddenly, sometimes they do. I can remember asking for creative advice in the past and would often hear, 'stick with it, do the work’. Now I'm seeing why that's the best advice of all.

Bill Crandall

"Returns" Exhibition Opening at Montpelier Art Center 11/18 7-9PM

Returns is about me, my family, my home, my loved ones, the village of Chl’aba, and the changing relationships I have with each and all of them. The project, perhaps never truly innocent, ultimately turned into an identity search; a search not only for myself but for my parents and closest relatives, and for people who are not there anymore. And it became not just a search for the past but a search for the present moment by people who are separated on two different continents.

    -- Gabriela Bulisova

As an immigrant to the United States, Gabriela Bulisova has a complicated relationship with her native Czechoslovakia, returning at least once a year to visit her family in her mother’s hometown, a small village of 800 people in southern Slovakia called Chl’aba. Along the way, she began a very personal project documenting her family’s life – and the village around them – in what is by far the most personal of her documentary projects.

After the project was underway, she met and married Mark Isaac, also a photographer, and they began to collaborate on the project. The result is a complex portrait of Chl’aba called Returns – drawn from the dual perspectives of Gabriela, who grew up spending summers there, and Mark, who was viewing it for the first time. Returns is now a decade long project that comprehensively documents family members and village life, including: the penetrating beauty of the vineyards, wheat fields, and the nearby Danube River; the lingering simplicity and longstanding traditions; the complex relationships among family members; and the tragic loss in recent years of several loved ones, including Gabriela’s father. For this exhibit, Bulisova and Isaac chose to place a special focus on Gabriela’s mother, Olga, who is still acclimating to life without Pavol, her husband of 49 years.

Returns has defined my summers for the past 7 years. To a great extent, my expanding freedom to photograph alongside Gabriela marked my acceptance into her family. As I met each of them, I was linked to a fascinating past that included encounters with World War II, with Communism, and a post-Communist reality that is not entirely rosy. Chl’aba has become a second home, one in which I still communicate better with images than words. (But I’m working on it.)

-- Mark Isaac

Returns is on view at the Montpelier Arts Center from November 6 to December 31, 2016, along with Atlantika Collective member Bill Crandall’s project “Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines.” The opening reception is on Friday, November 18, from 7 to 9 pm. For more information, see the e-post card, below.

From Installation of Returns

From Installation of Returns

Memoria Published by ViewFind

In August 2015, Atlantika members Mark Isaac and Gabriela Bulisova worked in the only penal colony in Ukraine for women ages 14-20. Titled “Memoria”, the project focused on the important recollections of the women who are held there. For the incarcerated women, memories of other times and places are particularly important to their identity. In fact, the interviews reveal that memories need not be solely focused on the past, but can be an inspiration to take action for the future.

ViewFind, an online photography publishing platform whose credo is “Connecting People Through Visual Storytelling” recently published Memoria. To view it and to read stories of the young women and the “keepsakes” that spark their memories, please visit: http://viewfind.com/story/memoria

Watershed Project: Installation weekend!

One of the most satisfying moments in the exhibition process is when installation time arrives. This weekend, Atlantika Collective members converged on the Boyden Gallery at St. Mary's College of Maryland to finally put the Watershed Project into motion. After 15 months of conversation, collaboration, development, evolution, and planning it's an exciting and nerve-wracking moment to see all the work, the words, and the objects together. Will the projects hold together like we envisioned? Will all the work play nicely in the space? Are our ideas and intentions as clear in real space and time as they were in our heads? And maybe most importantly, can we turn it around in just a few days? 

Check out the photos below, highlights from our installation process, including Atlantika members, gallery staff, and some sneak peeks of work in the show. We're pretty excited with the results - it really has a cohesion and interplay that comes from the consistent level of sharing and collaboration that got us to this point. We're worn out, but really looking forward to finally sharing it with other folks! Come see it if you can, and check back here - we'll be posting project galleries, the final work, installations and more.

Exhibition Opens: Tuesday, October 18

Community Reception: Friday, October 21, 6-8pm

, ,

The Watershed Project: Testing the Installation

, ,

Mark Isaac

Part of what makes Atlantika different as a collective is transparency. As our inaugural blog post made clear, “We’ll offer a more public view of our creative process than is typical, to provide some insights into our methods for shepherding work from idea to completion.”

That’s not always so easy to do. It offers a peek behind the curtain to moments of uncertainty, chaotic experimentation, and even outright failure. It risks having the veneer of a poised, highly skilled, confident artist stripped away and replaced with something a lot more fallible and human.

So in the interests of taking this goal seriously, here’s a rare glimpse behind the scenes to the very first test of the collaborative installation I’m creating with Gabriela Bulisova. In this video -- that somehow managed to become partially corrupted, adding to its charm -- you’ll see us testing our first concept of the installation using, what else? A baby pool, a mirror purchased at Target, and droppers left over from Trader Joe’s liquid stevia drops! If that doesn’t lead to great art, I don’t know what will!

If you come out to the opening at Boyden Gallery of St. Mary’s College of MD on October 21st, you can gauge whether we managed something a little more polished and sophisticated…and better yet, see how the early test informed the final vision.

Importantly, the final work calls attention to the way in which the entire Chesapeake Bay Watershed, comprised of 150 major rivers and streams, is interconnected. And as an interactive installation, it offers you a way to personally participate and demonstrate that anything that happens to part of the watershed has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem.

We’re hoping it’s a lot of fun to play with the water. But we’re also hoping the installation will convey that the Watershed, which supports innumerable life forms, including 17 million humans, is severely threatened and now relies on us for essential interventions that will restore and preserve its vibrancy for the future.

----------

Life Support, an interactive installation by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac, includes an IV bag, drip pan, beakers, droppers, projectors, water from the Chesapeake Watershed, and sound. It is on view at Boyden Gallery from October 18 to November 22.