Road Markings (2011) Mixed-Media (mandala)

Project Credits:

Participants


Cole Merkel 马凯龙
Darren Alexander         艾达仁
Ray 吴 雷
John Brown 罗 锦
Gary Davis 邓介历
Troy Ennis 恩德勒
Spence 石鹏史
Terris Herned         韩泰伦
Saul Cortez 高世武
Two Bears 雙 熊
Roger Fuch 方禄基
Benjamin Matthews        麦贲锦
Julia Munson 闵珠丽
Bergen Allee 李凤佳

Project Sponsor: Operation Nightwatch Portland
Event Sponsor: Lake Oswego United Church of Christ

Project lead and conceptions: Sarah-Andrea Morrigan  柳彩云

Phoenix

Photograph by Sarah Morrigan

Hello from scenic Molalla

Image via Wikipedia

I am typing this from the forest of Clackamas County, at the Camp Adams.

Constructing an artmaking ritual as social and spiritual practices (part 3)

Construction of a ceremonial artmaking as a social and spiritual practice
Sarah-Andrea Morrigan


Background for this project: In 2008, I began serving as the artist-in-residence for the annual Operation Nightwatch (Portland, OR) spiritual retreat in rural Clackamas County, Oregon.  The annual event, an invitation-only affair with a group of between 10 to 20 pre-screened participants, brings together various kinds of people for whom any similar event held elsewhere would be economically prohibitive.  Built upon the regular client base of Operation Nightwatch, this includes individuals in various stages of recovery, those living with non-mainstream mental diversity, and severe socio-economical challenges.  Since 2008, I had worked on the improvement of existing art-and-craft programming during the event by inspiring and providing infrastructure for creativity.  A well-stocked ad hoc open art studio is established each year through the duration of the event in the conspicuous common area to allow a free-flowing and open-ended artistic expressions and experimentation by participants.  I had also made conscious efforts at improving the artistic quality of the group project, as the product of the group project has traditionally been on permanent display and I felt that many of the previous years’ group projects appeared infantile and reflected low expectations placed by facilitators of participants, thus unduly underestimating their values as creative adults with a real life.


Challenges:
The past year’s project began incorporating the interactive social practice aspect of artmaking (making art as a conversation), but it did not produce a sense of community -- in fact, a certain person had vandalized the creations of other participants while no one else was watching!
In the effort at making it free-flowing and open-ended, the quality of the artwork suffered accordingly, and was far from complete when the retreat was about to be over.
This format came originally as a response to feedback that participants were being hurried endlessly from one activity to another and did not have mental space to take in the nature and the retreat’s themes.  How can we make a great art together, and have a great fun at it, and yet derive some serious spiritual meanings out of the activity, consistent with the overall theme of the spiritual retreat -- all without anyone feeling like they are treated like little children in a boring art-and-craft class being told by a teacher what to do?


Solutions:
While I am primarily a visual artist, art is more than visual and encompasses all modalities.  As a social art, each participant brings his or her own talents, personalities, and creative modalities to the mix.  Hence the project is no longer limited to visual art or specific methods, but rather incorporates a little bit of everything -- including performing art elements.
Taking the spiritual themes of the overall event as the point of departure, I had constructed the project to elicit creations of spiritual significances by participants.  This is accomplished through a ceremonial format.
The ceremony is constructed deliberately to be in keeping with the ecumenical nature of the organization with “no proselytizing policy” in place.  Instead of using the “lowest common denominator” (which usually involves a scaled down, minimalist Protestant Christian practice), however, I had taken the entire ceremony outside what may be familiar to the participants.  This is done for a number of reasons: (1) A retreat is a time outside the ordinary by design, and creating an environment that is outside the routines and the familiar is rather appropriate; (2) This way, I would not need to privilege a predominant (or any specific) faith tradition over the others -- in the rituals invocations are made to “Lushede” (from the La’adan language) to emphasize the all-inclusion in neutrality; (3) and thirdly, I hoped that this project will not only be multimodal and mixed-media, but also multicultural.  The ceremonies are generally constructed along the lines of shamanic rituals of the historic pan-Tungusic nations (eastern Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and Japan), with some input from the Chinese Buddhist and Daoist elements, as well as some parallels in the Native American rituals.
The all-encompassing ritual environment facilitates participation without making it feel like a compulsory “art class” or “craft activities” of the past.  Fully incorporated with the Exploration sessions of the retreat, participants can bring whatever the feelings into the ceremonial art while can also derive personalized meanings from the experience.  Likewise, the ritual elements create a special time and space within the event where certain intentions are held in common as a group.


The Art Project: Road Markings (2011, mixed-media, 18 inches x 18 inches) 

This year, in favour of enhancing the shared social elements of artmaking -- and in recognition that each person comes with a varied artistic skills and creative temperaments -- less emphasis is made on the visual media or development of skills.  The actual artmaking, heavily ritualized, is rather simple and easy for most people, involving a form of East Asian calligraphy (without needs for learning any language).


The panel is accented with a small canvas board painting representing the four cardinal directions according to the Chinese tradition: black turtle (xuanwu) of the north, blue dragon (qinglong) of the east, red phoenix (zhuque) of the south, and white tiger (baihu) of the west -- signifying that the the artwork represents the world in which we live. 


At the centre is a circular mandala made of paper leaves in various shades of green.  The leaves grow outward in a radial movement, representing the reaches of the world tree from the axis mundi that connects the heavens and the underworld with the earthly plane.


Upon the leaves are a spiral line, originating from the periphery extending inward into the centre of the circle.  During the ceremony, Chinese calligraphy brushes are passed around, and each participant may write words or ideas representing what they believe is the truths about who they are.  Outside the circle are straight lines, upon which what they believe is the falsehoods about who they are is written.  The spiral shape of the lines of personal truths also symbolizes a kind of pilgrimage, on which a person undertakes to take leave of the falsehood and into the ultimate truth, while discovering more and more about what is real and what reflects their own divine images.

Does anyone know whatever happened of her?

Once upon a time, God lived in and among us the Portlanders.

http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=27234

In honour of a nation history has forgotten

Image via WikipediaManchuria was home to various Tungusic ethnic groups, whose languages were more in common with Mongolian, Japanese and Korean, and with them shared a long tradition of shamanism.  Like the Mongols, at one point the Manchus became powerful and took over China, ruling over the Han and other ethnic groups for centuries.

At the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and beginning of the Republic of China (Xinhai Revolution, of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen), the Manchu people founded a separate country under the leadership of His Imperial Majesty Aisin-Gioro Puyi and with support of Japan, who had an interest in securing the strategic natural resources and railroads away from invasions of the nascent Soviet Union, and to have a buffer zone for Japan against the Bolsheviks.  The newly reorganized Manchuria quickly became the most ethnically diverse nation in Asia, with Japanese migrant farmers, White Russians who fled the Soviet revolution, Koreans, Han Chinese, Chinese Muslims, living side-by-side with the ethnic Manchu people.

The economy and currency of Manchuria at the time was considered most sound and stable in the region, only next to those of Japan.

In 1945, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria -- and shortly after the surrender of Japan to the Allied Forces, the Russians unilaterally handed Manchuria over to Mao Zedong's Communist Party.  Thus the nation was quickly forgotten except as a "fake (puppet) Manchukuo" that is occasionally mentioned in history books.  The cultures, spiritual heritage and language of the Manchus were all but destroyed.

There is however an effort to revive Manchuria.  Recently His Imperial Majesty Lee Chee Chuan, a direct descendant of the Tang imperial family who had been exiled to Malaysia, assumed his throne as the emperor of Manchuria (on May 28, 2011).

Speaking of cartography

Image via Wikipedia
Maps, just like history, are inherently biased and are outdated the moment they are printed.  We live in a dynamic world, with people with varying perspectives, and therefore a map does not convey an objective truth -- even if it might represent a widespread consensus.  The existence of international boundaries and its highly arbitrary and political nature is an epitome of this phenomenon.  We have the earth and its natural phenomena.  We then have a map of the world, neatly divided into various coloured zones.

Somewhere between the yellow sign (in Tsawwassen, BC) and the street sign (Roosevelt Way, Point Roberts, WA) is the U.S.-Canada border.

Look at the ditch on the right.  It is a border. (0 Avenue, Surrey, B.C., just a few metres east of the Smugglers' Inn, Blaine, Wash.)

The yellow concrete marks the end of Canada, while the USA welcomes neighbourhood walkers into the park with the sign "scoop your doggie poop." (On Peace Park Drive, Surrey, B.C., looking towards Peace Arch State Park, Blaine, Wash.)

On the ground level, such borders can defy the reality and may even be really silly, especially in case of the U.S. and Canada.