Participatory Projects: Vision Lab — Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Johnson Kulukundis Family Gallery: Gallery Performance Series 2018, 2019
The Vision Lab is an experimental arts and research collective attuned to the future of spirituality in the human and more-than human world. It is based at the Harvard Divinity School and creates performances, artistic works and collaborations combining radically imaginative cross-disciplinary conversations and experiential practices.
MEASURE
Anna von Merten, 2018
Von Merten used the structure of quilting to honor Henrietta Leavitt, a star counter and astronomer at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 1800’s. Leavitt and a cadre of women searched the 500,000 glass plate astronomical photographs for patterns among the glassy stars.
For the Vision Lab performance I printed STAR STRIPS, rectangular fragments of prints with marks that mimicked the stitching lines of Von Mertens, and also the trajectory of the starts in motion that Leavitt discovered when she stacked several glass photographs on top of each other from the same quadrant of the sky. My Star Strips were given to the audience as gifts and had questions written on the back of the paper, to initiate discussion after the performance. I had made an initial woodblock of stars’ motion in a stitching pattern many years before I knew about von Merton’s work. I also performed a monologue honoring the many star counters who worked with Leavitt. Dara Sobel’s book The Glass Universe tells the story of these remarkable women.
UNKNOWN AND SOLITARY SEAS (Dreams and Emotions of the 19th Century)
Dario Robleto, 2019
The Vision Lab started our work for the Gallery Performance response to Robleto’s exhibition by examining the human heart. Robleto’s exhibition visually expressed the 19th century origin of the pulse wave as a graphic expression of internal life.
In the spirit of relational aesthetics I printed an edition of prints with hearts growing from vines, and gave the audience these, as well as seed pods with HEART SEEDS, Cardio Spermum, in small envelopes. I did a monologue about the Heart seeds, which I grew in my garden and which have 3 white hearts on them where thy connected to the membrane in the pod, and also did a monologue about these seeds and Emily Dickinson and her gardens.
