SARAKURA

SARAKURA

(An attempt by the artist to capture and contain energy from the summit of
the eponymous mountain and tele-transport the photonic sound melange into
the cities below...unwittingly, the artist recreated an empress's revelation
as she descended the same mountain centuries ago...near dusk, the sky
suddenly shifted from a deep plum into a black violet and then moments later
to a black black...sans shadow, she exclaimed, "Apparently it can get even
darker." The name SARAKURA (EVEN DARKER) stuck.

They both witnessed the same phenomenon... she, after surveying her kingdom
at the golden hour...and he, after extracting photons from the air.)
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"A concatenation of jackpots has led me here: Aboard a boat above migrating eels.

Now: Drinking machined tea with the crescent moon peeping through a porthole.

Okay. This is a press release for a picture show about a mountain named Sarakura.
It's a study of movement...a series of disparate images, aural room tones and
scrawled rune tomes: Heuristic ushers in the nuevo romantick cinema.

Let's back up a bit...the eponymous Sarakura was my muse...
this show was composed in its shadow.

Picture a ball of rancid blueberry sorbet spinning in a static waffled cone
that is dusted with cinnamon. Oh! And now, look, a willow leaf of an eel
is emerging from the sorbet and now is winding up and around the cone
and there, now it croons in a cradle in a crack in the crest.

So, here's the deal: I was that eel...stumbling around that conical pedestal...

I, in my photonic toga, was time personified.

Here, may I present; A folded earth.

The energy of one equinox teletransported to the other."



AA, 4:43 AM, April 2, 2008. Somewhere on the Pacific.


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To be explicit, I spent 7 months in the town of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan in residency at the Center of Contemporary Art. The CCA lies in the shadow of a mountain named Sarakura that defines the sleepy town of steelworkers.

3 or 6 times per week, I walked up and around the mountain before returning to my studio at the base to transcribe the process in words, paints and sounds.

I envisioned myself as a bow (in the form of a migrating eel) drawn slowly across the strings/paths of the mountain. A song strung out over Autumn & Winter and played in Spring.

My works deal with inter-connectivity, and I was fascinated with the fact that the water I used for my aquarelles, my hojicha and my baths at the onsen all originated within the aquifer within/beneath? Sarakura.

So, the actual exhibition included elements from this process:

1) A dossier consisting of 100 pages of text and sketches that anthropomorphize the mountain. Dusted with cinnamon and placed upon a brick covered in lace.

1) 10 aquarelles (@120 cm2) referencing pages from the dossier.

1) A piece of the mountain's apex reclining on a couch resting upon the towel I used at the onsen near Sarakura.

1) Two (30-minute) soundtracks (one composed in Autumn and one in Winter)(presented via separate, portable headphones).