The Night Procession!

Hello Friends and Friends of Friends! I’m excited to tell you about this project I’m working on, and I would so love for you to participate in some way.

Basically, I’m making a night parade in South Philadelphia. I’ll be working with Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philly over the next several months to plan, design and build a twilight procession of illuminated sculptures organized around a fictional story.

The procession is scheduled for Saturday April 24, 2010. I’ll be an artist in residence at the Fleisher and while I’m there, I’m hoping to make a lot of friends in Philly, and incorporate elements from their stories into the larger narrative of the procession (which you can learn about by scrolling down).

Here are some preliminary plans for what we hope to accomplish (and would love your suggestions or help with) during my residency:

---We’ll be introducing the project to people who live along the planned procession route with hopes of involving them in some way. (These introductions may take the form of mobile tea parties [the less political kind] – I’ll be building an elaborate basket for my bike.)

---We’ll be working with artists, art students and the Fleisher Community in Philadelphia to design and build some of the sculptures to be used in the procession.

---We’ll also be working with these folks to design and print/paint the banners and flags to be used in the procession.

---We’ll be forming or working with an existing gospel choir and creating songs for them to sing during the procession.

---We hope to convince a step-dancing group or club to work with us.

---We’ll be involving musicians who would be willing to develop songs and/or play music related to the narrative during the procession.

---I’ll be providing several technical workshops while I’m in residence at the Fleisher. One will be an introduction to a special plaster that has been designed to bond with fiberglass, so it is very useful in making lightweight, hollow sculpture or masks. The second will be a paper lantern-making session. In both, participants will make forms that can be used in the procession.

And finally - we’ll be recruiting people of all ages to walk in the procession itself and carry the flags, banners, lanterns, candles, puppets, illuminated sculptures and other objects associated with the parade. This is not just for folks from Philly! If you and your peeps want to make a day of it and join us for the march, we’ll make sure you have an eerie swamp gas bloviator balloon, or the appropriate size bunny slippers, or what have you…

If you or anyone you can think of might be interested in any of these various and sundry activities, please let me know or have them drop me a line at nightprocession(at)gmail.com.

We’re in the very preliminary stages of the project, and would love to know who you think we should be talking to about it - local musicians, choir members, artists, step performers, makers of things, dreamers, electricians, good souls/soles, wire-benders, storytellers, wanderlusters...

There is an ancient poem that suggests we all “start a huge, foolish project, like Noah”… I find that when you do this, you grow close to the people who help you bail.

I’m so looking forward to it.

Project Description and Background

The Back Story
I am currently experimenting with using the very old performative tradition of the procession as a way to tell a contemporary narrative. The "back story" for the performance/procession is about a fictional elderly couple who had been married and living on Coney Island with a view of the ocean for sixty years.

Recently, she'd gotten a lot more "dreamy" and her husband had gotten much more frail. Their adult children feared their elderly parents couldn't take care of each other any more. Neither of the kids thought they could tend to both parents, so after selling off their house, the son took his dad to Maine and the daughter took her mom to Florida.



The distraught old man whispered to his confused wife as they were getting packed into separate cars, that she shouldn't be afraid... that "wherever there is water", he would be with her.

Some months later, in her daughter's house, Huberta got up from her rocking chair in the middle of the night, and when she saw her pocket book by the door, it occurred to her she was going out... and so she did. The screen door slammed behind her, but not loud enough to wake anyone in the house who was sleeping, so before anyone noticed she was gone, she was well on her way - shuffling through the suburbs in her bunny slippers towards the swamp in search of her love and her former life… .


The rest of the story tells of Huberta's adventures on her quest north by way of many bodies of water. She walks through dark rivers flanked by cypress trees and watering holes in fake safaris and fountains in bustling cities. She encounters many perils along the way, and many unexpected heroes. There are the swamp gas spectres, for example - horrible, Rush Limbaugh-looking, glowing, bloviators - who hover closer and closer to her, until the hairpins holding her bun in place form a chorus line of stewardesses on her head and high kick the noxious wind out of them.

She keeps meandering north, and by the time she gets to Richmond, someone has written an article about her, or a blog, so by the time she gets to Baltimore, she has a following... When she arrives in Philadelphia - this town of great parades, and home of the first parade in the U.S., - she is greeted with open arms and a night procession that recreates her journey so far with sculptural translations of her adventures....

The Procession

This narrative procession will use sculptural objects to perform a miniature version of Huberta’s journey and the mundane and mystical encounters she has had along the way. Some of the figures will be structurally based on processional figures of saints. One of my favorite things about my neighborhood in Brooklyn is the tradition of summer processions dedicated to patron saints, which involve a small throng of devotees carrying a statue representing said saint. They are intended to celebrate a particular, historical person and/or event with significance to the Catholic Church, but to me they are also a celebration of sculpture. A crowd of singing people marches through the streets literally elevating an object that an artist and artisans have made. And whether it is the actual intent or not, there is no question that this art object has become a rallying point.


"Wherever There is Water" involves a re-imagining of one of these processions, dissociated from the specifics of a church or a religion, but embracing the shared experience of moving through life as a quest, riddled with obstacles and accomplishments. The story of Huberta's journey is the story to be told in the procession, and it is the presence of this story which defines the performance as a "procession" instead of a "parade." The procession will be comprised of sculptures that represent Huberta and her old human friends, which will be heading north. There will also be performative objects representing the monsters and angels she met along the way, weaving their way around her, or walking for a while with her at various intervals. Some of the narrative is told through banners and flags - snippets of text that unravels from north to south as well as from left to right. Some of story is inferred by the sculptural objects and their articulations or their relationships with one another. And some of it is understood in the movement of the procession itself.

My Day Job Fixing Jesus

I don't consider myself a religious person, but I have a profound connection to these processional statues. For the last seven years, as a way to support my work as an artist, I have been operating a small business that restores statuary for churches, including this type of lightweight, portable saint. It is strange and wonderful work - painting Jesus’ toenails, reattaching angels’ ears, repairing broken heavens – the metaphorical accomplishments alone are rewarding.













Additionally, it allows me a connection to my family’s history as church restoration contractors in Baltimore, as well as to the unnamed artists who originally made the glorious objects in front of me. But until very recently, the work I do in the saint repair industry has, with very few exceptions, been completely separate from that of my own studio practice; one is my job and the other is my work. The two enterprises ran parallel, in the same physical space, with little or no overlap. But lately, I find myself turning what appears to be a significant corner. The processes and materials involved in the statue work have been playing an increasingly important part in the evolution of my own ideas, and a new potential trajectory has been emerging, which is incredibly exciting. This project offers the opportunity to incorporate not only the materials and processes of these objects into secular sculpture, but also to incorporate the forms and traditions of these festivals into an art event.

Bringing the Saints to the Studio

My most recent exhibitions at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and at Kendall Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, featured sculptural forms composed of cast plaster heads. Each head form is rounded where a neck would normally be, so it has the shape, size and weight of a large fruit.













The heads have been fabricated using the methods and materials involved in the making of the plaster statues I restore. I’m painting their eyes in the manner that saints have been painted for over a hundred years. I’m basing their palette on the skin tones of St. Augustine, St. Blaise, San Juan Diego and San Martin de Porres.













Without bodies, these heads become very contemporary forms, and address very contemporary questions, but they speak in strong, quiet terms to the past. This body of work was catalyzed by the presidential election campaign and what felt like a massive plea for a paradigm shift, which left me thinking about revolutions and the images associated with them.



















The resulting works call to mind stacked ammunition, toppled statues, fallen soldiers, crated weaponry and cannonballs, but they do this without gore or violence. Indeed, any potential threat is ideological rather than physical. And with regards to its new direction, this recent work demonstrates a sort of (slightly hyperbolic) personal revolution.














The most recent of these new pieces have started to experiment with the form of the head itself.






























These piece incorporated a broken bird removed from a statue of Our Lady of Fatima I restored. (The church wanted her doves to not be in flight, so I made new ones with folded wings.)












This piece was designed specifically to address this large column in the center of the gallery.




































This head got (happily) broken in transit to the gallery and became a metaphor for optimism.

The General Aesthetic of the Project

The general aesthetic of the northbound procession will
be very humble, with simple materials and modest color,
as is exemplified in some of my earlier pieces:

These small studies are made from masking tape and tissue.












This site specific installation in a carriage house in Ohio was made from floral tissue, masking tape and wild reeds. The walls of the "stable" were entirely masking tape, which I think is lovely when illuminated.


















The floating sculpture pictured below and in the blog header involved an existing dock, a simple steel armature, fabric and straight pins. It was installed for 10 days on a lake in Skowhegan, Maine.












This collapsible elephant is made from architectural blue prints and illuminated. It was part of a performance on a bridge outside of an architecture library.






























This mail truck is made from wax paper and airmailed
love letters. A oscillating fan under the sculpture made
its "skirt" fan out gently from side to side.












The figurative sculptures below are good examples of
how the figures in the procession will be constructed.
They will be modeled after religious processional figures,
like this one (which, sadly, I did not make).


















They often have light-weight, rough hewn wooden armatures (which are covered with elaborate garments during the procession) with well defined heads, hands and feet. In the sculpture below (which I did make), I covered the wooden armature with wax paper pajamas, but then illuminated it from within to reveal the structure.

Cloud Seeding Circus

Cloud Seeding Circus of the Performative Object was a traveling performance project (and FF alum) which I co-founded. It used sculpture and objects that needed activation as the starting point for live performances around the country.













The unfolding of the stage itself was a performance.













The project referenced historical circus performers or their acts, using them as metaphors for contemporary or timeless conditions, and aimed to be "art all the way down" to the ticket stubs. The act below involved three articulated, wearable bear sculptures and their three pink lady trainers, each of whom had a second set of spring-activated arms.












I performed as "The Great Monkeena." She had a mystical
relationship with birds (these are illuminated paper puppets),












a few moderately trained animals, and a parasitic twin,
which happened to be a lively tapdancer.

Funding and Support

The development of the procession is being supported in part by:
-a generous grant from Artists and Communities, a program of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation made possible by major funding from The Heinz Endowments, the William Penn Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
-a 10 week residency at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia and an exhibition at their affiliated gallery, the Suzanne fleisher and Ralph Joel Roberts Gallery.
-1 week residency at the Maritime Art and Inspiration Center on Andros Island in the Bahamas.

Additionally, invaluable research assistance is being provided by the irreplaceable Kay Turner, the folklorist at the Brooklyn Arts Council.