CLAREMONT by Lewis Baltz, 19731. Riding on the brown line towards home, the sun set into darkness. A high rise apartment passed by; my reflection in the window. Dead City... dead city... The train rolled on. Then my reflection in a more distant window described a smaller 'me'. An even further window set me back to nearly tiny. I was enticed by my self's alteration because of the moving train.
It led me to sketch an image of the receding window; considering the great variation in scale that is, consequently, based on where one is situated... to the massive expansion of a city GRID. Look at one from where the clouds float, and see how slight they do seem.
- creating depth by layers of flat surfaces.
2. I'm working on a project currently for my Puppetry class in which I have taken an old window frame, sans the glass, stretched a paper across, and painted a sea-scape. In the corner of the canvas, a smaller metal frame contains a silhouette of a sailboat that is held 'afloat' by a magnet on the other side of the paper. The magnet can then be moved from the back of the paper to move the sail boat across the 'ocean'.
I like the image of something defined entirely by it's contour, but also captured in a constructed box, that can travel within a larger plane. People seem to be doing that every day just by walking around. All the trials and memories and thoughts come along the the body, wherever it may go.
- pane inside a pane. box in a box.
3. From looking at the places that Sam finds herself throughout the day, I began to explore the arc of this play.
sc. 1 - "apartment" is home.
sc. 2 - "street corner" is a traffic place.
sc. 3 - "spa" is a relaxing place.
sc. 4 - "cemetery" is a reverent place.
sc. 5 - "office" is a busy place.
sc. 6 - "eating establishment" is a fancy place, as well as a replenishing place.
sc. 7 - "library" is a quiet place + exploratory place.
sc. 8 - collision of all places : a turning point.
sc. 9 - "internet cafe" is a virtual place.
sc. 10 - "subway" is a traveling place.
sc. 11 - "basement bar" is a dark place.
sc. 12 - "nearby Hudson" is the closest we come to a nature place.
sc. 13 - "maternity ward" is a birth/creation place.
sc. 14 - "night club" is a chaos place.
sc. 15 - "taxi" is a homeward bound place.
sc. 16 - "apartment" once again.
sc. 17 - "bed" is a safe place.
In the beginning, the places she visits have clearer definitions of accepted social interaction, but as the day progresses, we move into more abstraction of the certainties. Sam leaves her home and moves through her day externally to find understanding of her self internally.
- exterior search for clarity within.
We live behind windows that can reflect light from the outside, and radiate light from the inside. As the sun sets, the illumination of the inner grows brighter and stronger.
Questions:
What is in between? Where is the portal that leads us from one flat
plane to another? Is there something more 3-dimensional by the end of this play? Maybe we travel from flatness to greater depth.Words:
journey. unreal. numbness. blur. books. rows. real. refound. surrounded.
libraries are a lot like cities. books get lost like people: mis-ordered, mis-shelved but eventually rediscovered.
a link to some beautiful natural photography : M.F. Wolik
The sand images seem somehow fitting -
This is all really beautiful. I like the idea of being inside these boxes, or that we are so clearly defined by our contours - we can become so unhappy, unfeeling inside the boxes society has caused us to create for ourselves. We may put our real selves in a box, and then as we move further and further along in life that box gets smaller and smaller as we move away from it. And then we are giant boxes filled with air, and our true selves are in a tiny box that can no longer express itself because it is lost inside us. Or something like that.
ReplyDeleteI love what you did with each scene. Think about how you can express each idea without constricting what we find in rehearsal. This idea does help me a lot, though.
The sand image is glorius. Will you paint that on my wall? It's amazing that nature could create one shape that looks so much like other shapes in nature (trees!)