Unrelated diamond (photo credit: David Bernabo)
by David Bernabo
It’s time for a proper roam—not a review, not a thought piece, but a travelog through the last month.
The massive heating of our world has provided many more opportunities for warm winter walks this year. At the beginning of March, 6,000 consecutive steps took me into the midst of a small crowd gathered outside of a new bookstore and living library Paper + Dirt. Located at 7105 Reynolds St. in Point Breeze, this brainchild of Chas Wagner (of Pittsburgh Art Book Fair renown) and Mackenzie O’connor (of Point Line Projects) is minimal in design but potent in content, mainly in the intersection of outdoors, arts, and sports. I believe the space is still being renovated, but keep an ear out for more events in the future.
***
Prophecies & Soy Sauce Shots, performance still (photo credit: AudreyMedrano)
I’ve been a longtime attendee of the New Hazlett Theater’s Community Supported Arts (CSA) series but as the series finishes it’s 11th season, I’ve found it skewing towards more traditional works. The first five or six or seven or eight seasons contained interdisciplinary works that were often an experiment, of sorts, for their creators. Work by Princess Jafar, Ricardo Iamuuri, Anna Azizzy, and the duo of Anqwenique Wingfield and Jules Mallis was often inventive, skewered expectations, and took big risks. Monteze Freeland and Anya Martin produced engrossing, detailed, and absolutely stunning work. Cole Hoyer-Winfield and Carl Antonowicz based their storytelling in puppetry and comics. And there was so much dance, often in the best of ways. A few of the presented works failed dramatically (technology has improved in the last decade), some were uneven, and some were just beguiling, but that’s all totally ok if an artist could venture further down a new path. A visual artist would try their hand at dance and sound design. Coming at these forms from a different angle produced intriguing and unexpected results. But the last two seasons have had an uptick in plays and narrative-heavy works. Often, opening exposition gives away the game, setting up twists and turns in the narrative, but not the format and presentation of the work. Some of these works were incredible, but I’ve been longing to see forms of performance that I haven’t encountered before. You know, some weird shit. I miss the mystery of not knowing how to process a work.
Luckily, across town in the East End, another series also turns 11 this year, Kelly-Strayhorn Theater (KST)’s Freshworks series. The series runs more casual–it occurs in the Alloy Studios space–and is more focused on works-in-progress. That can take some pressure off of the creators and performers, but it also takes pressure off of the audience. There’s a feeling of we are all in this together. The reason for that might be structural. The series touts itself as a “creative residency for artists,” and having participated in a few Freshworks performances, I can tell you that that is true. (Full disclosure: I was also in three CSA pieces, and they were some of my favorite creative efforts.)
So, this implicit encouragement by KST to experiment continued with Caroline Yoo and Davine Byon’s performance of Prophecies & Soy Sauce Shots on April 5 and 6, 2024. The piece deals with themes related to the Asian diaspora—family, place and displacement, food, and traditions—while also being about the performance of works about the Asian diaspora. Byon’s casually-improvised stories provide a humorous and charming entrance into the piece, while Yoo’s manifesto-esque recitations, enhanced by a commanding reverb unit, fill every inch of the space with sound and instruction for how to digest the work. There are gorgeous projections that bounce against metallic surfaces and through semi-transparent fabric. There are smooth transitions. There are some delicious-looking foods eaten throughout the performance. In one of my favorite sections, four performers exist in a deep silence, each independently and asymmetrically moving—one performer slowly brushes their extremely long hair, another crafts a dwelling. I read it as community that can exist separately while still coming together to join in a few rounds of soy sauce shots. A week and a half later, I’m still processing the work. It has a curious arc, and I wanted to see more. I think these are good things for a work-in-progress showing. Anyway, pro tip: If they take the work beyond the work-in-progress phase, maybe eat dinner before you see it.
***
One Big Eye, film still (photo credit: Sobia Ahmad and Benny Shaffer)
In the Fall of 2022, I drove a gas-guzzling automobile through the largest living tree in the world. Pando is a quaking aspen tree in Utah. It looks like a forest, but this 0.63 miles by 0.43 miles span of trees is actually one organism linked by its root system. It was awesome, but it was cold and for some reason, I found the nearby Fish Lake more awesome. (My photographs of the lake show a stark black, white, and blue alien landscape.) Then a bunch of dudes with pickup trucks and truck nuts weirded me out, and I skedaddled to my next destination.
So, I was thrilled to watch Sobia Ahmad’s hand-processed 16mm film, One Big Eye, at the Miller ICA. It was part of Second Degree Vision: CMU MFA Exhibit 2024. Part of the appeal for me is the many angles of Pando that I didn’t get to see. The footage blurs with my own memories of the land. I can take the texture of the black-and-white film and mentally add the color of the tree and hills. All the subjective events that took place in my life around that time get to live beside the film’s questions about the interactions and distinctions (if any) between humanity and nature.
Made in collaboration with Benny Shaffer, Ahmad writes of the process, “The footage was processed at home over the kitchen sink over nine months using an experimental coffee-based developer, which includes other non-toxic, everyday domestic materials such as washing soda, vitamin C powder, and salt. Processing several minutes of footage requires many hours.”
On April 7, Ahmad and Shaffer were joined by multimedia artist Jessica Fuquay for a live 16mm screening of One Big Eye Expanded. The film seemed to have fewer hand-processed artifacts than the gallery version (or maybe the screening was just darker), and there was a lovely section at the end that dealt with abstraction. Fuquay’s live sound score was an engrossing journey in the texture of the forest–winds, rustles, and deep groans. It’s completely different in sound and goals, but it put me in a similar headspace that froths up when I listen to Lionel Marchetti’s La grande vallée, only, like, times a 1,000. I’d buy a copy of the score if someone released it on vinyl. Just saying.
***
Grief Cake, gallery view (photo credit: David Bernabo)
Last of my recent roams was to Bunker Projects to see artist Laurie Trok’s wonderful new solo show Grief Cake. My favorite work is a large series of 22 works on paper called History of a Sugar Sculpture. As I understand it, the works are byproducts of spraying a different series of sugar-based sculptures with FD&C dyes and propylene glycol. Whatever the precise details, each work is otherworldly, looking like some great gust of air blew dust particles out of a deep cave. Or like the remnants of a quickly departing presence from some myth. Delicate and powerful, much like the materials. For potential art buyers, maybe store these works away from your mini-split heaters in the winter, unless you’re super into transformational art.
Grief Cake is on view at Bunker Projects from April 5-May 3rd, 2024.
David Bernabo is an oral historian, musician, artist, and independent filmmaker. His film work has documented western Pennsylvania food systems, climate change, the studio practices of composers and artists, and the histories of iconic arts institutions like the Mattress Factory. He is most noted for Moundsville, a documentary co-directed with former Wall Street Journal writer John W. Miller, which screened on PBS for three years.
PETRICHOR 
Leave a comment