Halsey Burgund picked a good time to explore the right/left political divide in American life. We could use a path that can make sense of how ideological polarities might intersect. Burgund is a Boston-based installation artist, software developer, and musician. All three of his pursuits share a preoccupation with harnessing the creative and emotional force of the sound of human speech and putting it to new uses.

Radio Right Left is a project that Burgund launched on his site in January. With volunteers from both ends of the political spectrum anonymously contributing recorded statements addressing our collective future and where they see themselves in it, Burgund works to bridge a divide, allowing everyone the opportunity to take in the views from the other side, possibly fostering some much-needed understanding. That’s the hope.

“The point of the piece is to try to pop the filter bubble, and not just dismiss people who don’t agree with you. I didn’t want this to be about specific issues,” says Burgund. “I feel like there are certain contingents within the political perspective that are trying to divide us, because a divided populace is more easy to control. Simply dismissing other people because they disagree with you on one issue is, I think, counterproductive to the health of the country.”

Using location-based information from smartphones and an open-source application that allows users to upload their commentary, Burgund aims to create a map of the U.S. that might not conform to our somewhat simplified Red State/Blue State conception of things. What comes through is the sense of anxiety that pervades the country. Or perhaps the anxiety of a particular audience that is inclined to participate in a journalistic audio-art project. The piece uses randomized pieces of these voices, floating in and out against Burgund’s ambient-leaning music that hovers and blooms along with the scraps of speech.

Bog People is one of Burgund’s site-specific sound installations

Burgund’s work isn’t always so current-events-related. He’s used geo-tagging technology in projects—such as Tributaries, made in Tyneside in the north of England—that invite volunteers to contribute audio pertaining to a specific location. This then gets uploaded and can be accessed by users when they’re on that same spot. It’s a bit like having the power to turn the whole world into an interactive audio museum tour, with evocative cinematic music to go along with it. Burgund has also created projects like Bog People, about a decommissioned cranberry bog in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Gathering the voices of people who use, work on, or visit the land, Burgund, with the help of the randomizing software, gathers together and re-presents a sound story about the location and the layers of individuals who it has meaning for, and who shape it or are shaped by it.

These aren’t just spoken documentary fragments. The attraction to the subtleties, textures, distinctive phrasing, tonality, and emotional resonance of human speech is something that has fascinated the 43-year-old artist for years. Burgund’s first venture into blending the musicality of speech with instrumentation involved a recording of his parents reading one of his poems. Since then, he’s also made music that uses recorded voices, sometimes from people answering questions about a subject (“What would life be life with no oceans?”), and sometimes with random zany fragments of speech—complete with bursts of laughter, pauses, or peculiar stresses—gathered from volunteers contributing to his project. The voices are saying things that listeners can generally understand, but Burgund seems as interested in the rhythmic dash and flow of the sound as the words being uttered. The work of minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier come to mind in some of the ways Burgund approaches speech as a form of musical material. His music also evokes comparisons to the landmark Brian Eno/David Byrne album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, which gathered archival bits of speech from preachers and newscasters, using the voices as a component in jittery but funky post-punk songs.

“The voice has multiple levels of content and only one of them—a very small one of them in my mind—is semantics,” Burgund says. “To me, there’s so much more information that one can get.”

Think of Pokemon Go, a huge event in the mobile gaming world last year, and imagine an artist with a fondness for narrative, speech, and ethereal music taking the same positioning technology to make art that is interactive, archival, and personal. Making spectators into contributors and enticing them with the thrill of unlocking and accessing facets of a piece of art by moving through space, while they take in the setting and history and give something back of themselves, gives you a sense of what Burgund is up to.

Halsey Burgund – sound artist
Boston, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Twitter

All photos courtesy Halsey Burgund

The post #TakeAction: Harnessing the Voice of the People appeared first on Take Magazine.

Sarah Mikolowsky is an arranger of things. It’s hard to be any less broad in describing what she does, because that’s also the most specific, all-encompassing way to talk about her process. She collects and she assembles. Whether the outcome is an illustration, a botanical wig, a grimacing puppet, monster lingerie, or a floral arrangement, assemblage is her means to a varying end.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

Mikolowsky earned her BFA in Illustration from the University of Connecticut in 2007. Soon after, the enthusiastic New England student with an appetite for wanderlust fled west. After spending a couple years in the microbrew capital of Bend, Oregon, she migrated to western Washington. In 2012 Mikolowsky established herself as a farmer florist on Orca Island off the Washington coast, cultivating a dedication to arranging the local flora in a way to highlight it’s native beauty. A short chat with Sarah will reveal that the very core of her inspiration as an artist is rooted in the nature of a flower. “A seed has so much potential—it knows how to organize itself into this absolutely beautiful thing that I have no way of recreating.” While that may be true, this concept of careful organization to create something beautiful—or striking and pleasantly weird looking—is a common thread throughout her work. Mikolowsky relies on intuition in her creative process, “I put things together based on how they feel together,” she says, “pulling strands out of what seems like chaos and creating a new order to it that makes it something palatable for me.”

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

About a year ago, Mikolowsky returned to her home state of Connecticut, secured a silk-screening studio in Hartford, and has been roaming the region making arrangements of all sorts ever since. While she no longer grows her own plants, this self-proclaimed “roving floral designer” stays New England-local in her freelancing—spending this past summer, for example, farming and designing at Tea Lane Farm on Martha’s Vineyard.

Mikolowsky’s most recent exhibit, Buy Me Brunch, with assemblage accomplice Jonah Emerson-Bell appeared at Hygienic in New London last fall. The show, which featured mixed-media installations and wearable, functional pieces, investigates the experience of “the human meat suit” (aka the body) as a “self-sustaining machine that functions as an interface between the physical world and some obscured metaphysical reality.” Mikolowsky is all about dismantling symbols of culture—details of reality that perhaps go unnoticed—and reassembling them with other things or symbols to create something different, something imaginary and eye catching that disarms the viewer, perhaps suggesting that the body is the sole messenger between a real, physical world and the nebulous concept of the human mind. Not to mention that the Renaissance-era-inspired botanical wig she created for the show deems Kylie Jenner’s self-appointed creative ownership of “wigs” null and void.

Photograph by Josh Ericson

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

“It isn’t ugly, but it addresses how funny things look and how funny things are,” Mikolowsky says of her concept for Buy Me Brunch. “Both of us (Jonah Emerson-Bell, collaborator) have a tendency to pick things out of little vignettes of culture and restructure them, crack a joke, and create something new. For me that ends up being a lot of wearable things like the monster lingerie. It’s almost a bigger form of puppetry, like costuming. I tell a story by making a collaged sculpture that’s wearable.” Perhaps the most striking of Mikolowsky’s work is the “monster lingerie,” which normally comes in the form of some wearable top—bra or shirt—with lavishly adorned monster eyeballs prepensely placed over where one would imagine the nipples are. A juxtaposition between the funniness, almost awkwardness, of the design, and the connotations of sexuality with its placement, dismantles a culturally enforced shame surrounding the human body by rearranging it to create something head-cocking, something you might giggle at.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

Mikolowsky’s affection for her home region breathes through her work. While she appreciates the tastes of her interim western home, it seems she prefers the unique harmony of old and new she finds in New England. “The aesthetic of New England is really different from what I’ve seen on the west coast as far as what people are interested in,” she says. “I try finding a mixture of the potential here and the history here. I like putting those things together.” As much of the materials she uses in her puppetry and lingerie work are found in thrift stores, the old trends that have been cast away or forgotten are central to the construction and aesthetic of her work. 

In 2017, Mikolowsky plans to maintain her floral designing gypsy status, continue producing work out of her studio in Hartford, delve into a collaborative electronic music project, and pursue a possible printmaking residency. No doubt we’ll be back in touch with her.

Photograph by Tia Morton

Follow Sarah Mikolowsky on Instagram @auntie_beast

The post The Nipples Have Eyes appeared first on Take Magazine.

Tempest, Light, The Gentleman Farmer – these are just a few of New-Milford-based abstract photographer Rick Giles’ exhibitions. His style is atmospheric and textural, creating a visceral reaction upon looking at this work. Giles’ images include people, landscapes, or objects, but it is how he captures light, in its pure form, that delights. It relies upon a melding of humans and nature to create an effect. In his own words, Giles states that “It is this very pull of nature that has proved the influencing factor in Giles’ own move from the city to the countryside. A change that provoked an adjustment in approach to the subject matter and allowed more of a personal exploration of the environment in which he lives.”

In his show entitled 23.5°, which is Earth’s axial tilt as it orbits the sun, he reveals what he intended to capture, “This photographic series was shot across one year, on 7 acres of land, and sets out to interpret the seasons through the changing hues within the landscape.” The abstract images, seen in series, remove the usual indicators of time and place; here we rely on the colors and feelings the images evoke to determine when we are in each season. Time moves quickly here.

Image from 23.5° | Courtesy of Rick Giles

Giles has also documented his relationship with the farmland that he inhabits in New Milford, in his series called Unearthed. This exhibition “encapsulates the relationship between man and nature. It documents [his] engagement to the place [he] has chosen to live and [his] progressive domestication of the land.” Giles explains since moving here, he has been excavating and digging out objects ranging from “obvious” such as farming implements, to “absurd,” like gigantic toy dinosaurs. The objects belonged to the generations of families who lived on the land before Giles. Found items are photographed behind dingy glass on a black colored background and give the impression that he’s somehow photographed them in situ.

Image from Unearthed | Courtesy of Rick Giles

Rick Giles was born in England in 1969 and now lives and works in New Milford, CT. He represented by Eleven Gallery, London, and his works are also available at The Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong and has been shown in museums such as London’s National Portrait Gallery and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

Top image from 23.5° | Courtesy of Rick Giles

The post Gaze Through Rick Giles’ Lens appeared first on Take Magazine.

He’s too black, too vocal and too flagrant. He’s also one of the few indispensable figures in Hartford’s ever-continuous push to art and cultural prominence. Say hello to the city’s new brash monarch.

The post BL&D Interview – Arien Wilkerson appeared first on Take Magazine.

Editor’s Note: If you just heard about the artist ANNA SCHULEIT HABER, it’s probably because of what she did on her summer vacation. She spent a month in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a former mill town not at all on the art literati’s radar, conducting a friendly takeover of the front page of the local newspaper with imaginative typography. The MacArthur Fellow collaborated with the Sentinel & Enterprise and the Fitchburg Art Museum on a project that involved turning 26 consecutive editions of the daily newspaper into a work of art centered on a letter of the alphabet. Typographers from all over the United States and the world created the letters, which dominated their respective front page and informed articles, essays, poems, and quotes that riffed off the A, G, Q, etc. The whole thing was stunning, subversive, and accessible—a profound celebration of ink and newsprint, journalistic experimentation, and bringing art to people’s everyday lives.

While Schuleit Haber worked on The Alphabet, fellow artist Nanette Vonnegut wrote this essay about Schuleit Haber’s body of work—from years-in-the-making installations at abandoned hospitals to paintings to musical compositions— and the connections between the two artists and Vonnegut’s late father, Kurt.

Orange Tulips, 3rd floor. Installation, titled Bloom, of 28,000 flowers in bloom and 5,600 square feet of live sod. Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, 2003. Commissioned by Harvard Medical School and the Department of Mental Health of Massachusetts.

It is mid-November 2000. I am in the laundry room, trying to match socks and feeling hopeless. Just when I want to scream, I hear in the distance J. S. Bach’s Magnificat, like a musical thunderstorm close by. My husband reminds me that an artist named Anna Schuleit is doing a soundcheck for a sound installation called Habeas Corpus, to take place the next morning at the grounds of the Northampton State Hospital.* As the crow flies, this place is just a mile away, over houses, gentle hills, and a field or two. I am beguiled and want more of the magic that is rattling my doors.

Besides the socks, I have my hands full because my father is visiting from New York City. He is grumpy because Northampton is not New York City. Now I know I have something special to show him. “Dad, I’m taking you to something magical in the morning. Wear a hat.”

The next morning, I fetch my father and he is bundled up against the cold, gray day. He did not forget to wear his stocking hat, which is on crooked, making him look more curious than grumpy. There are hundreds of people gathering, milling around, gazing in anticipation at the massive vacant brick building, Old Main, that once housed adult men and women deemed insane. It was enough to be poor, or old, or a wife who had stopped being useful around the house to get a spot at the Northampton State Hospital.

I am thinking of these men and women when the condemned building and the air around it quicken to the sounding of trumpets and timpani. The perfectly engineered panoply of sound has entered the marrow of my bones and somehow not busted everything along the way. The crowd is a pulsing cloud of humanity, slowly drifting around Old Main. No one dares to peek in the doors and windows to look for the source. As if on cue, the sun parts the concrete-like clouds and pours straight into the heart of Old Main. It is over in 28 minutes. I am wondering if my father is thinking of the destruction of Dresden or of his mother’s sudden death right before he shipped off to war. I do know he is deeply affected. “I can’t believe what just happened,” is all he says.

At the root of a lot of art is some kind of injury that needs addressing. Sometimes the right strand of words or a line drawing of someone you miss will do. The decades of neglect and acres of broken human hearts that came to define hospitals like this one, however, called for 40,000 watts of electricity conducting carefully selected music through 15,000 feet of electrical cable and 102 speakers amid thousands of square feet of brick and mortar. Anna envisioned that “the sound [would] travel through past and present times in one breathtaking, effortless movement.”

I did not know it then, but it was my two dead grandmothers who were rattling my doors as I wrestled with those socks. Since then, I have been digging for information, coroner’s reports and medical records, to try and fill the vast blanks in their lives. No luck with Grandmother, whom I never knew, but medical records for Granny, whom I did know, arrive by mail. Granny was institutionalized twice in a state hospital much like Old Main—once in 1943 for 12 months and again in 1953 for 6 months. The order of commitment allowed for sexual sterilization, citing “the best interest of society.” Maintenance cost: $10 per week. The medical records note: “Manic Depressive Reaction, Manic Type . . . was high school Valedictorian, unusually able in literary matters, particularly writing . . . Lesbian tendencies.” I weep. She got out and went on to be the most boring, sweet-smelling Granny ever.

As for Grandmother, I found a brief obituary in the Indianapolis Star: “Suffers Fatal Heart Attack.” Of course that is code for “not exactly sure since barbiturates and alcohol were involved.” She died on Mother’s Day, that stingy, cruel day that reminds mothers of the other 364 days they will not get any flowers. A message to mothers everywhere: try not to die on Mother’s Day. It is a seriously bitchy thing to do to your children. But it is easy for me, a mother, to understand the extra swig, another pill, knowing my son is being sent off to war.

After Habeas Corpus, Anna went on to complete more site-specific installations in New England. Bloom took place in 2003 in a vacated psychiatric hospital in Boston: 28,000 blooming plants, 5,600 square feet of live sod, water, volunteers, and recorded sound for four days, for FREE, “to address the persistent absence of flowers in psychiatric hospital settings.”

Anna Schuleit Haber’s studio

Even pixilated, the images of Bloom uncoil my tense little heart. Anna’s unstinting use of flowers to fill yet more vacant, grief-stricken spaces was exactly what was necessary, nothing less. I felt electrified in a familiar way as I studied photos of Bloom. The power of the visual matched the power of the sound that marked Habeas Corpus. Anna never puts herself at the center of her installations. Her large, beneficent visions have always depended on the generosity of others, making the installations a collaborative effort. Habeas Corpus gestated for four years and nearly died for lack of funds and support before finally coming to life. At first, Anna’s idea for Bloom was met with disappointment because she could not see repeating Habeas Corpus at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. Visions need to spontaneously combust in others to see the light of day. Whether in a day or years, Anna’s ideas caught on and set off a chain reaction of generosity in others that finally made the concepts live and endure as works of art. No one is more humbled by this creative process than Anna Schuleit Haber.

The MacArthur Foundation, angelic and moneyed, looks for and funds exceptionally creative, pathbreaking individuals. On September 1, 2006, the director of the program called Anna, then 32, to let her know she met every single qualification to be a MacArthur Fellow and that she was already making the world a better place, citing her installation Bloom as “a work of conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty.” The award comes with no strings attached. No person getting that call from the MacArthur Foundation sees it coming; he or she is usually on the way to work, taking a bath, or paying bills. This is a phone call the Fellows will never forget. The media calls the fellowship the MacArthur Genius Award, because it is easier to say genius than to list qualities like transcendent, brave, tenacious, and compassionate. I Google “genius,” and nothing about hard work or compassion shows up. Genius seems to be a word that is in love with itself and does not do anything.

Thanks to the MacArthur grant, Anna could afford to be in her studio full time for the first time in her life. She returned to her first love: painting. Her drawings and paintings show us where she has been, always saying, “Human being here.” She employs 200 brushes and no two are alike. One could say of Anna’s work that there is always just one of one, which can lead to 2 or 2,000. Her work looks as though her whole body is moving through it. I see long strides, stillness, and maybe some tap dancing. Her work stands in direct proportion to life, which, in her case, sometimes requires the side of a building or 25-foot panels of raw linen.

As I write this, I find myself feeling dizzy because I know I cannot cover the breadth of Anna Schuleit Haber’s work. Luckily, I have a fainting couch in my studio. I like to think I am being useful, fainting by proxy for artists like Anna so they do not have to. I am grateful for all the heavy lifting she does without complaint.

My father did not love to write. It was mostly torture, a lot of sitting and failing and foraying into the kitchen for fatty snacks, a cigarette always stuck to his bottom lip. When I write, I feel very close to him—I am wearing a bodysuit made of twigs and twitching more than actually writing. But if you are patient, there comes a magic pairing of will and muse: a beloved sister, a wretched boyfriend, a Granny. They make the waiting worthwhile. Then a word, a brushstroke, a song, a cure, the best joke ever. Both Anna and my father remind me about staying and not leaving.

The Voice Imitator, started in 2013, is a work in progress, a collaboration involving the written word, musical composition, and paint between two artists who happen to be husband and wife. My mouth waters as I read the proportions of the work: one short story to one composition for piano to one painting, 1:1:1, which is multiplied by 104, the number of short stories in Thomas Bernhard’s 1978 collection, Der Stimmenimitator. Bernhard’s words move through Anna’s voice; are transmuted into short musical compositions by her husband, composer Yotam Haber; and are then sent back into Anna’s brave and able hands. This much information passing through two human bodies, winding up as art, is explosive and seriously playful.

Effective is the most useful, unsexy word I can come up with to describe what I think art, at its best, can be. What I experienced years ago at Old Main effectively challenged and changed me. I was witness to others changing around me. I felt ghosts brushing by me, going home and not looking back. Anna’s Habeas Corpus really did move the Magnificat through me, and the past into my future. I stand in awe of the veracity of her visions and her conductive powers.

In response to my introductory e-mail, in which I explained that I had been at Habeas Corpus with my father, Anna wrote, “The short of the story is that people told me that your dad was there that day, but it was just a rumor. It means so much to me . . . I was (and still am) such a big fan of his work. Having the circle close by getting to know you fifteen years later is a true gift.”

On a perfect June day, I met Anna at last in Harrisville, New Hampshire, where she spends her summers. As I sat waiting on the front porch of the Harrisville General Store, I explained to a curious elderly gentleman that I was meeting a dear old friend whom I had never met. He must have noticed my flapping wings. Suddenly, I was looking up into Anna’s open, intensely lovely face. Our words looped around our heads and played a gentle game of tag while we ate our lunch on that porch. There was so much catching up to do; there were so many stories to finish. Anna explained how much my father’s writing had affected her life. Sitting with her, I was struck by her radiant kindness, the key ingredient that arcs through all her work— what makes it stand so tall. The circle was complete and round with love and respect for the art that had saved our lives in countless ways. Three hours later, it was time to go.

Finally, Anna Schuleit Haber, meet Kurt Vonnegut. Dad, meet Anna. I can easily imagine my father asking Anna to run away with him and Anna answering, “I have always loved you, but I am married.” Then my father: “Teach me how to paint.” Anna: “You have to do that on your own, but stay and watch how I stay.” My father: “Darling, I have never left!”

Habeas Corpus, a sound installation for Northampton State Hospital. | Photo by Hedwig Schussler

Anna Schuleit Haber – artist
Harrisville, New Hampshire
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Top photo by photographer Ashley Green

The post Transcendent and Tenacious appeared first on Take Magazine.