The Urban Irony

The Six Viewpoints & Sculpture.......SPACE & MOVEMENT Class 3/3 at the Packing House Center for Arts

Today is perfectly overcast for Tom's photography. The sun peeks through here and there to warm us up just enough. Today we explored a diamond in the rough; The Northside Park. The industrial ruins have become a site for majestic sculptural architecture that sets the park a part from it's surrounding pollution, land-fill junk yard, slaughter house, camouflaged-soldier lurking surroundings. What a simple joy it was to be outside and how rejuvenated we all felt afterward.

With my recent struggles to adapt my work into an urban setting compared to my previous home in Durango, Colorado of a more rural landscape....it seems as though the striking and beautiful irony of the park was just what I needed.....

The History of The Northside Park (These links will tell you about about why and how this abandoned sanitary sewage plant became a community-boosting, habitat-encouraging, artistic site):

http://www.asla.org/meetings/awards/awds01/northside.html

http://www.westword.com/bestof/2000/award/best-reuse-of-a-sewage-plant-39987/


Today's last class would be uplifted and carried through with fresh air and sunlight:
Deconstructing, Isolating, Meditating, Listening to SPACE & MOVEMENT




A sonic landscape of singing bowls that followed us outdoors

Suspending the moment

Thank you Steven

SPACE- perceptual ability to see and feel physical relationship

Observing and Participating with SPACE

Initial entry into the park

working in 3 columns
Walk, Run, Stop
attuning your awareness acutely
the body's relationship with the architecture

MOVEMENT - perceptual ability to experience kinetic sensation

blindfolded
working with partners
visualizing the Kinetic Sensation from points of contact
moving the sensation from place to place
(above)


responding to kinetic sensation with movement

The following 3 Series:

Visualizing a pathway from beginning to end
moving along the path
leaving a trail of earth
along the way.....
allow a kinetic sensation to provoke any movement the body wants

All Photos by Tom Murray

With the series ending I have absolutely no feeling of being finished. Perhaps because I never will be. I constantly feel like I am on the brink of a beginning. With a process that offers a new discovery, with each new moment, the work is being constantly reborn.

Although this series has been so brief, it has taught me an ocean of thought: I've identified how strongly rooted the work is with the immediate and natural landscape- however "unnatural" it may seem. There is strong vibrating unknown within the work that feeds participants and myself to explore new ways for building the bridge between performance and sculpture every time. I've come up against the reoccurring frustration of not knowing how to reach more people through the work. And yet, been humbled and blessed with my family's openness and unending support.

I could not have been possible without those who were able to come. Thank you.

Thank you Tom. For a photographer's role in extending the life and providing visual reflection to this ephemeral but yet so residual work.

Thank you Packing House Center for Arts. What a wonderful gem.

Thank you Mary. For the words and your own work. For your gift is always giving.

There will be another Project to begin in the Spring. Be ready!

We will be diving even further off the cliff into each individual Viewpoint in hopes of someday, submerging our entire bodies in the undulating sea of The Horizontal!