milagro intro
In the autumn of 200[ ], Gareth Jones and Jerry Gordon organized a day-long art show in a retired Japan Railways tunnel near present-day Takedao Station, Hyogo, Japan--near Kobe . The exhibition, called The Tunnel, included 10 artists from 7 countries. In works ranging from drawing, painting, photo, sculpture and sound art, the artists used the tunnel as their common theme, exploring its physical, aural and historical qualities, etc. Held in October, the one-day show was well attended and enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, partly due to the popularity of the site for hikers. "The show wasn't aimed at gangs of Boyscouts and elderly ladies in boots, but they seemed to enjoy the surprise of seeing weird stuff in the dark," said Gordon.
For the show, Jones created a series of 18 small pencil drawings on paper. Mounted on boards, the 18 pieces were hung along one of the walls of the tunnel and lit by single votive candles attached to the bottom of each drawing's frame. The flickering small lights dotted the central length of the slightly curving tunnel, serving as both a signal of each piece's location in the dark, cave-like interior--drawing viewers further into the blackness--and also making each piece like a tiny altar, setting up something akin to an illuminated rhythm of make-shift niches for a series of obscure saints or martyrs. "The drawings were small within the large space. The candlelight could barely reach the surfaces of the drawings, and so people had to come close. They had to create a private and intimate space to see the pieces. This is how I wanted people to view the works."
The 18 drawings were based loosely on milagros (ex-voto offerings) Jones had seen on a recent trip to Mexico.
From this initial showing, Gordon got the idea to write poems for them. He said, "When I saw Gareth's drawings, I felt that there was something of an open narrative running through them. As he told me about what milagro are like and are used for, I was facsinated by their modularity and by how the individual anatomical pieces are both personal and shared. A person buys a milagro and attaches it to some sacred object in a church with the hope that the power of the holy object can help him. That's a personal wish. But, also, these things are mass produced. As well, the meanings of the images seem pretty open. I mean, if someone buys a migagro of a heart, it is to get healed from heart disease or heartbreak?"
"For me, Gareth's drawings serve as something similar. The images feel very iconic and somewhat sacred, but not of religious figures. More like neighbors or familiar strangers riding the subway. That's the church that interests me. So, I wanted to try and hear the story that I felt was floating around them. I carried photo-copies of the 18 drawings in a file in my bag for a couple years and would pull them out on the train or in cafes and wrote on their backs. I tried to respect the open and dissolving narrative that the group has on its own, but also wanted to layer something into it, to imply subtle and shifting directions which come into allignment along certain gestures without turning it into a buttoned-down tale. I wanted to be able to climb inside their story as my own."
The layouts that follow in this book--images on the left facing poems on the right--maintain the pairings which occured when Gordon composed the poems on the backs of the drawings, but neither Jones nor Gordon think that this is the exclusive way the pieces should function together. The poems are not descriptions of the illustrations. And, future presentations of this collaborative work will probably take different forms, such as with the images being projected on a wall while the poems are read, neither following a set ordering or exclusively one poem for one drawing pattern.
For the show, Jones created a series of 18 small pencil drawings on paper. Mounted on boards, the 18 pieces were hung along one of the walls of the tunnel and lit by single votive candles attached to the bottom of each drawing's frame. The flickering small lights dotted the central length of the slightly curving tunnel, serving as both a signal of each piece's location in the dark, cave-like interior--drawing viewers further into the blackness--and also making each piece like a tiny altar, setting up something akin to an illuminated rhythm of make-shift niches for a series of obscure saints or martyrs. "The drawings were small within the large space. The candlelight could barely reach the surfaces of the drawings, and so people had to come close. They had to create a private and intimate space to see the pieces. This is how I wanted people to view the works."
The 18 drawings were based loosely on milagros (ex-voto offerings) Jones had seen on a recent trip to Mexico.
From this initial showing, Gordon got the idea to write poems for them. He said, "When I saw Gareth's drawings, I felt that there was something of an open narrative running through them. As he told me about what milagro are like and are used for, I was facsinated by their modularity and by how the individual anatomical pieces are both personal and shared. A person buys a milagro and attaches it to some sacred object in a church with the hope that the power of the holy object can help him. That's a personal wish. But, also, these things are mass produced. As well, the meanings of the images seem pretty open. I mean, if someone buys a migagro of a heart, it is to get healed from heart disease or heartbreak?"
"For me, Gareth's drawings serve as something similar. The images feel very iconic and somewhat sacred, but not of religious figures. More like neighbors or familiar strangers riding the subway. That's the church that interests me. So, I wanted to try and hear the story that I felt was floating around them. I carried photo-copies of the 18 drawings in a file in my bag for a couple years and would pull them out on the train or in cafes and wrote on their backs. I tried to respect the open and dissolving narrative that the group has on its own, but also wanted to layer something into it, to imply subtle and shifting directions which come into allignment along certain gestures without turning it into a buttoned-down tale. I wanted to be able to climb inside their story as my own."
The layouts that follow in this book--images on the left facing poems on the right--maintain the pairings which occured when Gordon composed the poems on the backs of the drawings, but neither Jones nor Gordon think that this is the exclusive way the pieces should function together. The poems are not descriptions of the illustrations. And, future presentations of this collaborative work will probably take different forms, such as with the images being projected on a wall while the poems are read, neither following a set ordering or exclusively one poem for one drawing pattern.
posted by jerry at 10:52 PM
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