Mother Earth, Mother Earth

"She breathes good luck!" - Xavier Rudd.

I had the great fortune to meet Xavier a few years back when he made his big debut at Floyd Fest. I love his music, and I love his message. Why? Well this video of his song, "The Mother" sums it up for me. Enjoy!

Gotye and the Art of Making Mirrors

While I'm on the subject of deconstruction of art, I couldn't help but think of Gotye, another interdisciplinary artist who has made quite a name for himself deconstructing music, recording samples of it, and building those samples into a magnificent collage of sounds. If you don't know who I'm speaking of, you will most likely recognize this particular song, "Somebody That I Used to Know," Here's the lovely video, which also happens to illustrate the idea of building and deconstructing art. 

I am fascinated with Gotye and his creative process. I particularly love that he is making art from found objects, in a way, by going out and collecting old vinyl albums to sample for his sounds, and then building a collage of unique music with a style all his own. I'm also enamored with the fact that he often incorporates his own and his father's visual art into the making of his albums, not simply using them as inspiration, but also on his album covers, in videos, and as visuals for his tours. There is always a visual element to his work. Here's a short documentary from Gotye's website about the making of his award winning album Making Mirrors. It was filmed and edited by James Bryans and directed by James Bryans and Wally De Backer. 

The Washed Ashore Project: Interdisciplinary Environmental Art

It's been a while since I've talked about interdisciplinary environmental art, though I'm always using this term to describe my own creative antics. I've blogged several times about art that inspires me, my degree program at Goddard, and my internship with artist Pam Longobardi. Recently, with the news about Hawaii's state-wide ban on plastic, and LA becoming the largest city to ban plastic bags, I've been really excited. I already blogged about this over at my Keeper of the Zoo blog.

Change is happening out there, and I truly believe that the arts are playing a very important part in creating that change. Art in all it's forms can carry powerful messages that are difficult to ignore. Far more difficult to ignore than statistics and facts. Art, if done well, touches people's emotions, allowing the message it carries to resonate, where facts and figures and fear mongering just don't. There have been numerous world-wide art projects centered around plastic marine debris, now. It's thrilling for me to see the evidence that they're working, and people are being inspired to implement change.

There's one statistic people have been ignoring for far too long. About 300 million tons of plastic is produced each year and yet less than 10% of it is recycled. I'm not sure how that is ignorable, but thank goodness there are artists making the effort to educate people about it.

Art is always best experienced in person, but since we can't all get on a bus together and head to the nearest installation, I thought I'd share a video about The Washed Ashore Project, led by artist Angela Haseltine Pozzi. She gathered 1000 volunteers to clean up 3.5 tons of marine debris off twenty miles of beaches. Then, she created interactive art installations for children with it. It's amazing stuff. This, my friends, is art at its finest!

Marginalized: An Interdisciplinary Art Installation

Rattlesnake, part of the Animanity installation, oil on board, by Amanda Corlies SandosWith less than two weeks to go, I am working a bit frantically to complete all of the little details for my next art installation, a show called Marginalized. I'm fairly excited about this installation because it's showing in a very conservative venue in my very conservative town, where I think it needs to be seen. It's not that I think these installations will change people's behaviors in some big epiphatic (if that's even a word) way, but they might make people stop and think, because, at the very least, they will certainly make many of them uncomfortable.

Marginalized includes my own work concerning our connections to and disconnections from animals along with my studio mate Terri J Miller's portraits of third and forth world women. The show will open on the first Friday in May at 6 PM in the Soul Cafe in Lynchburg, Virginia. It's an interdisciplinary show. The installations I am showing are mixed media combining multiple painted portraits of animals with quotes from various literary and historical texts about those animals. The quotes show how we learn from various sources a hierarchical language which serves to disconnect us from the idea of ourselves as animals. After all, Homo sapiens is simply another species like every other. But, we think of ourselves as something different, something better, something separate from the rest of the species on earth. Surely, we are not animals. Then, we often use that hierarchical thinking to marginalize others, and not just animals or indigenous people, but our very own community members, the person next door who is "different." This art installation is geared towards making people really look at how hierarchical thinking and language disconnects and distances us from others.

Terri and I will be including performance pieces in Marginalized, as well,  via our djembe drumming group, Nataraja. We will be performing ancient drumming rhythms from around the world, some of the earliest known forms of long distance communication between tribes. One of my favorite rhythms is one of the earliest known drumming chants called the "Mother Rhythm."It's simple and powerful and has a rich history of being played by and for women.

Anyway, when I say I'm interdisciplinary, I'm not just playing around, folks. If you are a bit of a science nerd, like me, you might say I'm a lumper and not a splitter. I put things together and look at how they interact, where they can combine, what happens when they do. I'm really serious about looking for the power that lies in the places between, where seemingly different and perhaps even opposing forces can come together in new and exciting ways.

In The Ravens Crossing news, a very different, but no less interdisciplinary project I'm involved with, we are a part of the Showers of Books Giveaway Hop for the next couple of days. You can hop on over today to read my Morgan & Holly story and enter to win a $15 Amazon Gift Certificate. All you have to do is leave a comment on one of the stories to be entered. Then, click on the showers icon and you will find a ton of other blogs with giveaways and tons of great authors to read.

Later this week, I'm hoping to have my installation photos ready to share. In the meantime, here are a couple more single images from the two large installations for your enjoyment.

You Can Dress Him Up, part of the Humanimality installation, oil on canvas, by Amanda Corlies SandosEmerald Boa, part of the Animanity installation, oil on canvas, by Amanda Corlies Sandos

We Are the Youth

Continuing with my look at interdisciplinary art, I highly recommend you check out two fantastic Brooklyn artists and a whole group of brave LGBTQ youth who have come together in a photographic journalism project called "We Are the Youth." Created by photographer Laurel Golio and journalist Diana Scholl, two childhood friends from Brooklyn, the project combines portraits of young people with their written stories, told in their own voices. It was created as a way to address the lack of visibility and the marginalization of our LBGTQ youth by giving them a place to share their stories honestly and by treating those stories respectfully. More than forty young people from around the United States have already stepped forward to be profiled. The project has been shown in places like the Brooklyn Museum and featured in numerous journals such as The British Journal of Photography. 

To read Braxton's profile from the lastest show, check out this article in The Huffington Post.

For those of you in or around the New York City area, you can view the latest show of "We Are the Youth" at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The opening reception is this coming Friday evening, April 13th from 6-8 PM. The show runs through May 12th.

If you are interested in getting involved with this project, go here. You can be profiled if you identify as LGBTQ and are under 21 years of age. All donations to "We Are the Youth" are handled through the project's fiscal sponsor, The Brooklyn Arts Council.

Last, but most certainly not least, another installment of YA LBGTQ sci-fi, fantasy story, Morgan & Holly was published today over at The Ravens Crossing. It's free. Who doesn't like free? Enjoy!