Acculturation in a Pre-Apocalyptic Age
 There are only four days left of the exhibition by our friends at Crawl Space Gallery, Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel. Go see it on Saturday the 15th or Sunday the 16th! One uber-bonus is that you can see a photograph of yours truly taken by the indomitable Anne Mathern. Here is what an awesome local blogger had to say about my portrait as forest creep/feral woman. In her new art blog Translinguistic Other. “For me, the most compelling object in the current exhibition is a photograph titled “Black” by Anne Mathern. . . The model is a friend of the artist and the tree is located in a well-traveled public park, but the illusion is complete: this woman is the absolute embodiment of the wilderness, that dark and mysterious “other” that alternately terrorizes and seduces civilized men in their wildest blood-soaked dreams. Like the strategically positioned teepees along the National Mall, she is here simply to tell us that she is still here—even after all the broken treaties, all the demonized mother goddesses, all the wanton exploitation of natural resources—she is here, staring back at us with an unbreakable gaze that we are only now able to guess the meaning of:
I was here long before you were, Pilgrim. And I outlive you, every time!”
Hurry on down to Crawl Space this weekend to see:
THIS IS THE WORST TRIP I’VE EVER BEEN ON:
Acculturation in a Pre-Apocalyptic Age
Here is info about the artists as I have taken directly from their website.
“Crawl Space member artists and best friends Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel present new video, sound, and sculptural works responding to a stretch of solitude in the wilderness. Based on Wentzel’s quasi Vision Quest of solitary truth-seeking in the Olympic National Forest, the works in This is the Worst Trip represent a kinship in the taking-on of culture and spirituality.
In Wentzel’s sound piece “Dona Nobis Pacem,” the artist sings a Latin hymn as learned with his younger sister in Parochial grade school. Completing the round is his sister Dana, who joins him over the phone from her new home in Alaska. Their reunion revolves not around any spiritual connection to the hymn itself but rather a connection between one another through the religious practice they assimilated fifteen years ago.
For her latest video work, Anne Mathern appropriates her best friend’s sub-cultural past by memorizing and performing a freestyle rave dance the artist had recorded months prior. Taking on the absurd task of mimicking Wentzel’s style and completely random movement, Mathern subverts the original expressive intentions of the dance and reduces them to a learnable cultural identity”.
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