It’s hard to escape the debate over the proposed border wall with Mexico, but, if you live in New England, difficult to envision the area where it would go. New media artist John Craig Freeman has brought the U.S.-Mexico border to Boston through a technique called augmented reality (AR), or digital information integrated into the world in real time. His project, Virtual U.S. Mexico Border, enables viewers to be in two different worlds simultaneously.

A friend and I downloaded the layar app onto our iPhones and looked for the virtual wall at the Boston Common under a blue October sky. As we approached the band shell, past the hot-dog cart and tennis courts with the Prudential Center partially visible, the words 12 points of interest found appeared on our screens. We wondered if people thought we were playing Pokeman Go, which uses the same technology.

“I’m in Mexico,” my friend called out. I was a few steps behind her but soon saw it emerge: a wall decorated with a colorful mural. We walked closer, it came into focus, and then we walked through it to the U.S. side, where a barbed wire fence came up from the beach. We had the disconcerting sensation of stone-faced border guards watching us. We saw the backs of people peering through the fence to the area where friends and family from both sides can meet briefly.

Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

“One of the things I try to do is humanize stories that have a political theme,“ says the professor of new media art at Emerson College in Boston. “Our politics now rely on the notion of the other. Making a border is a psychological thing.”

Commissioned by the 2017 Screen City Biennial in Stavanger Norway,  the border project was his way of documenting the North American migration crisis. Shortly after he was done in Norway, he set it up in Boston.

Along with his other AR projects, it is “geo-located,” meaning he has enabled it for specific locations. He takes hundreds of photos on location, then builds the scene by using software to extract a three-dimensional model. He can replicate it anywhere, and he has no set date for taking this one down.

At the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Freeman has another project, Virtual China and Virtual Russia, where, by being in two places at once, a viewer can experience their connectivity. In Virtual China, a mother and daughter sitting in a courtyard of a former palace can be seen during a virtual walk through the city of Wuhan in Central China. In Virtual Russia, an image of Saint Petersburg emerges piece by piece as viewers walk along designated points. Both are part of The Augmented Landscape, presented by Boston Cyberarts on view through November 30th.

“China and the Baltics were two parts of the world that were critical to Salem becoming an important port,” Freeman says. “We think of globalization and international trade as occurring now, but it has been occurring for hundreds of years.”

Seeing the pieces is not hard. Simply enable location on your smartphone or tablet. Download and launch layar app. Pull down upper left menu, tap Geo Layers, then Search Layers and search for Salem Art or US/Mexico Border.

Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

Studying painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a master’s at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Freeman soon realized that he was not cut out for conventional art that he would need to market. Instead, he wanted to make public art “to address the social and political issues of our time.”

Then the internet became a public square. “We saw the migration of the public square to everywhere but nowhere,” he says. “I followed it down the rabbit hole to mobile networks and turned to the quest to create new forms of art.”

A native of San Diego, Calif., Freeman lives in Windham, N.H. His work isn’t so much influenced by where he lives as by “how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place,” he says.

John Craig Freeman–new media artist
Windham, New Hampshire
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Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

The post Exploring an Augmented Reality appeared first on Take Magazine.

The two-dimensional never interested Boston-based artist Clive Moloney: 3-D offered more room for his imagination to roam. As a child growing up in the countryside in County Tipperary, Ireland, he created little towns and farms made from hazel tree branches and garden tools. As a graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, he created sculpture out of found objects such as laundry baskets, fans, plastic bags, with the intent of getting people to look at domestic objects from a different point of view.

In his exhibit at Contemporary Arts International in Acton, Massachusetts, Breathe, Pause, Breathe, Moloney goes a step further with a large-scale installation of multimedia projection and moving body-like parts that seem to breathe. It takes up more than 700 square feet. “The main aspect is to create a fantastic environment,” he says. “It may cause people to question how they perceive their own environment, particularly in terms of time. I regularly attempt to slow the viewer down, and this is often in stark contrast to our everyday lives.”

In the exhibit, extended through September 29, Moloney drew inspiration from The Quarry, the site of CAI, where the owners’ mission “is to promote the creation, understanding, and appreciation of contemporary art in the global context.” The 12-acre campus, the site of a former granite quarry, is surrounded by close to 100 acres of forest.

The exhibit took Moloney three years to finish. “Three years is a long time for a body of work,” he says. “There are a lot of structural engineering challenges, and you had to learn it all as you went along.”

A section of Breathe, Pause, Breathe / image courtesy of Clive Moloney

Moloney used latex because of its flexibility to create the appearance of skin on the parts that inflate and deflate as they move at alternating slow and fast speeds in a 10-minute loop. The pieces dip into vats of liquid latex, building up layers and twisting around, with tentacles forming and falling off. “The motor that drives it is like a life-support machine,” he says. “The enclosed system is like our bodies are. I started with the Buddhist idea of meditation and watching the breath.”

The 33-year-old left Ireland six years ago to study at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where he completed his MFA in 3-D in 2013. He got his BFA in sculpture at Limerick School of Art and Design in 2007. He has exhibited at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Occupy Space in Ireland, 555 Gallery and Gallery Kayafas in Boston, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans.

Moloney has come a long way from Tipperary, a landlocked rural county that’s home to mountains, rivers, lakes and farmland. He says he always knew he wanted to be an artist; his father, an electrician, and his mother, a nanny, supported him in his dreams. “Within my fantastic environments, I investigate the true nature of chosen materials,” he writes in his artist statement. “My work exploits transformative materials that go through chemical reactions and changes of material states such as plaster, cement, sugar, and latex.”

A section of Breathe, Pause, Breathe / image courtesy of the artist

Moloney says the process is as important as the product. “The artwork goes through several steps and processes before completion. Mold making and casting is an example,” he says.

In the CAI exhibit, Moloney’s first major piece after earning his master’s, collaboration was also part of the process. He relied on the expertise CAI co-founder and Hungarian-born sculptor Viktor Lois, known for his machine creations. Lois did troubleshooting and helped weld pieces together. Moloney’s wife, an immunologist, lent biology textbooks and discussed her knowledge of the human body. Sue Murad, an artist and filmmaker who lives in nearby Jamaica Plain, made a video.

Next up Moloney plans to head to Taiwan to an artist village in Soulangh for two months to do a artist residency hosted by CAI co-founder Yin Peet, a Taiwan-born sculptor and philosopher.

Clive Moloney–artist
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image from Breathe, Pause, Breathe, courtesy of Clive Moloney.
Video is by Sue Murad.

The post A Moving Experience appeared first on Take Magazine.

Maine performance artist Sara Juli makes a point of saying the word vagina at least once a day. “It’s a perfectly lovely word,” Juli says from her home in Portland, Maine, where she in moved in 2014 with her husband and two children after 15 years in Brooklyn.

“It’s not a curse word or an offensive word,” she says. “It’s a body part. How can you empower girls if they can’t say a part of their body? It should be celebrated, not shunned.”

Unfortunately for Juli as a new mother, that vagina gave her a lot of trouble, going into spasms that led to four years of urinary incontinence. Luckily for her as an artist, she found a way to use humor as the basis of a performance piece based on her actual diagnosis of tense vagina, the treatment for it, and the chaotic years of new motherhood.

Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at Asheville Masonic Temple in 2016, photo by Kristofer Alan Thompson

The piece, “Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis,” premiered at the experimental SPACE Gallery in Portland in 2015 and has been touring ever since. “I was quietly suffering,” Juli says. “I assumed that peeing in your pants all the time was part of the experience of having a baby. Women say they suffer their whole life from this. What I love about using humor on a taboo topic is that it allows people to listen to you.”

Treatment for dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles at a pelvic floor rehabilitation center in Portland form the basis of Juli’s piece. At her first visit, she started choreographing her performance. She weaves in what she calls “the underbelly of motherhood, the loneliness in the early years of raising children.”

This hour-long solo uses humor, movement, sounds, songs, text and audience participation, Kegel exercises, and vibrators “in a non-sexualized way,” Juli says. “I think it’s empowering for women to think about their vaginas and what their vaginas need.” In program notes, she includes information about the location of local pelvic floor rehabilitation centers.

A native of Waterford, Connecticut, Juli trained in modern and improvisational dance, graduating from Skidmore College with a degree in dance and anthropology. To Juli, the two fields are related. “Dance is all about connecting with people,” she says, “and anthropology is about connecting with people in all cultures.”

Juli’s work has been performed in New York at such places as Performance Space 122, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Joe’s Pub as part of the Dancenow/NYC Festival, as well as nationally and internationally. She will perform “Tense Vagina” at Ko Festival of Performance in mid-July in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Juli credits the move to Maine with invigorating her creation of new solo work. “In New York, thousands of voices are similar to yours,” she says. “My career has taken off since I moved to New England. My voice is stronger. The air quality alone makes you feel happy.”

When she is not working on new performance projects, Juli is building a fundraising consulting practice, Surala Consulting. In the practice, she advises national artists and non-profits on strategic fundraising solutions. “The arts are threatened in a major way,” she says, “and making sure that artists have a diverse fundraising profile is critical.”

Sara Juli–performance artist
Portland, Maine
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Top Image Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at American Dance Festival 2016, photo by Grant Halverson

The post Vagina Matters appeared first on Take Magazine.

“This is a story about the transformative power of art,” Vermont dancer Lida Winfield says as she glides around a stage that is bare, save for a pile of books that she circles and stands on. “This is a story about believing.”

When she graduated from high school, Winfield would not have been able to read those books. That’s because she is dyslexic, and fell behind in a school system that devalued children with learning disabilities. In her signature piece, In Search of Air: Growing up Dyslexic, the Vermont dancer employs modern dance and spoken word (both recorded and her own) to express the anger and frustration that she felt during those years. Music and movement match the content, from quick and sharp to slow and flowing, and finally joyful after she describes how a teacher taught her to learn kinesthetically, using movement to help her understand language.

Wearing a white sleeveless dress and waving a sheet of gauze behind which she sometimes disappears, Winfield mimics jumping rope in the playground and then extends her hands over her head to illustrate her words: the teacher made her wear a dunce cap. A male voice coming over a speaker suggests that this punishment reinforces dyslexics’ belief that if they fail, they see themselves as stupid.

Long Gone duet | Photo by Pauline Jennings

“The goal is to give a window into my experience,” the Bennington resident says, “and to show how important the arts are. It can also be about all who have had struggle and heartache in their life.”

Winfield has performed the piece on and off for the past six years at schools and conferences around the country and on tour in Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere. She also tours other pieces, including Long Gone, in which she and another dancer, Ellen Smith Ahern, explore how the dead live on in memory and imagination. She has performed on rooftops and in fields, woods, streets, beaches, and galleries, and often in other dancers’ projects.

“I was a kid who played outside, in the woods, and more than anything, that’s impacted the way I create,” Winfield says of growing up in a small Vermont town. She started dancing when she was two and acting when she was seven, joining a multi-generational dance/theater company at 14.

Photo courtesy the artist

Winfield finally learned to read at Landmark College, a Putney, Vermont, school for students with learning disabilities. There, a teacher taught her to learn by doing, such as spelling while doing jumping jacks or reading while moving, with the words written on big sheets on a wall. It wasn’t a straight trajectory, but afterward, Winfield got a bachelor’s degree at Goddard College, followed by a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts. Her thesis topic was a prophetic one: “Using the Expressive Arts as a Healing Tool for Transformation.” Would that she had known that herself when she was a child, in need of her own healing.

Recession Special European Tour – Double Vision, Long Gone duet, Lida Winfield & Ellen Smith Ahern, 2011 | Photo by Marek Procházk

You can see Winfield on April 6 in the Faculty Dance Concert at Middlebury College, where she is a visiting lecturer in dance. She is scheduled to perform a duet with Maree ReMalia that is an excerpt of her new work, Imaginary. She will also perform In Search of Air in June at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine, which will be followed by workshops on art, disability, and training for educators.

Lida Winfield – Dancer
Bennington, VT
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Top photo Recession Special European Tour – Double Vision, Long Gone duet, Lida Winfield & Ellen Smith Ahern, 2011 | Photo by Marek Procházk

The post Putting Words in Motion appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s a long way from a village in Senegal to prestigious film festivals around the world, but that’s where Samba Gadjigo’s documentary Sembene! — about Ousmane Sembène, a dockworker who became a novelist and filmmaker and hero to millions of Africans — has brought him. Indiewire called Sembene! a “true life epic” in its preview before the Sundance Film Festival. The film has also been shown at Cannes, Telluride, Sydney, New York, and other film festivals. The first New England screening is Nov. 13 at 4 p.m. in Gamble Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where Gadjigo is a professor.

Almost as interesting as the documentary’s focus is the story of how Gadjigo found his way to a career in higher education after growing up in a family of farmers and wood carvers. Gadjigo’s family provided the region around their eastern Senegal village with wooden utensils carved by the men. “I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who made pearls and incense for brides,” he says. “We traveled from village to village.”

Ousmane Sembène, standing at left, on the set of one of his films | Photo courtesy of Sembène estate

While rural, eastern Senegal is “a region that is very rich in languages and cultures,” says Gadjigo. By age 14 he spoke five languages, including French, which, along with African cinema, is what he teaches at Mount Holyoke.

Neither his parents nor his siblings could read or write; Gadjigo was the first to finish grade school. He then moved 400 miles from home to attend a French high school. That’s where he discovered Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood, a novel inspired by a paralyzing railroad strike in colonial Senegal in 1947.

“The book opened my mind to the world and the importance of self-representation,” says Gadjigo. “[Sembène] wrote a novel with black characters that were very powerful. His work has always been about how to empower the disenfranchised.” Gadjigo eventually formed a friendship with Sembène and became his biographer.

After attending college and getting his master’s degree in French and African literature in Senegal, Gadjigo thought he could only teach high school, unable to afford future graduate study abroad. But then, he says, “Opportunity came knocking at my door.” A college roommate who got a scholarship to the University of Illinois told Gadjigo the school was recruiting teaching assistants. Gadjigo earned his Ph.D. there in 1986 and began teaching at Mount Holyoke the same year.

Ousmane Sembène, left, with Samba Gadjigo | Photo courtesy of Samba Gadjigo

On the day of Sembène’s death in 2007, Gadjigo promised that his stories would not be forgotten. He and Jason Silverman, a film festival/arthouse director and producer, teamed up for a documentary that consumed them for seven years while they raised money through Kickstarter and from other contributors and combed through Sembène’s rare archival film footage and exclusive materials. Sembene! chronicles its subject’s 38-year career making films that often took on controversial political and cultural topics, and it brings to life his creative mission to, as he put it, “give voice to the voiceless.”

The post True Life Epic appeared first on Take Magazine.

Candice Salyers grew up in Nashville, but since moving to Northampton a decade ago, it is New England’s vibrant landscape that has inspired this innovative choreographer and performer. “I love the beauty of the landscape and the variations it goes through every year,” she says.

Salyers creates site-specific work incorporating that landscape. In a piece she did for the Vermont Performance Lab, she moved throughout spaces on a grassy expanse around the Creamery Bridge in Brattleboro and a narrow passageway inside it. On the ground, she stenciled in chalk words such as “Patience Is One Path to Gratitude.”

“It was about how we move through spaces in our hearts into something more open,” Salyers says.

Salyers will lead audience members through another space Oct. 29 when she performs near Brickyard Pond, moving into the Main Theater of Redfern Arts Center at Keene State College, New Hampshire. Called A History of Levitation, the piece includes seven solos exploring aspects of female sainthood. “Saints are love letters. They’re people who can love no matter what,” she says.

Photo by Jim Coleman

As a child, Salyers, a visiting professor of dance at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, dreamed of being a preacher. “But that wasn’t an option for me.”

Although she resisted when her mother signed her up for ballet lessons, Salyers later realized dancing was another way of being holy. “Dance has an interesting way of grounding spirituality,” she says.

Salyers, who is pursuing her masters of divinity, continues to explore the divine in dance today. “I keep trying to go beyond the misconception that God is separate from people. I want to know, how can I approach everything as a prayer?”

For the upcoming performance, Salyers and four collaborators drew from the lives of saints who embodied faith and perseverance. “I’m mostly interested in the task of putting oneself through extreme conditions,” she says. In one segment, she dances with rocks in her pockets as a metaphor for being weighed down but continuing to move.

“It’s designed so that there are doorways into it for everybody,” she says. “I hope it reminds people that they are doing something like this in their lives, that there is a way that they’re being brave.”

The post Calling the Divine appeared first on Take Magazine.