Learn about art, meditation, crystals, decor, life hacks, and spiritual practices! Join me as I give you regular updates on my sacred art and tips for how to live a holistic and fulfilled spiritual life.
I've been helping a buddy refinish his house, and he's been pulling out and saving these gorgeous pounded nails for me. I've been experimenting with them all day.
Nails make me think of many things, and today I've been thinking about them in connection with relationships. "I hammered her good," "Got to nail that down," "Nailed to a cross for her sins," it has all trailed back to the work I've been doing with my own explorations on how our society views female sexuality.
Did you know that there are half a dozen patron saints for women who have been victims of adultery, and no saints available for adulterers, although St. Gangolf is the patron saint for husbands unhappily married. Interesting.
St. Gangolf
According to Associated Press, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy who released a study in 2012, in 41% of marriages one or both spouses admit to infidelity, either physical or emotional, and 54% of women say the've committed adultery in any relationship they've had.
So, I thought I'd make a very needed saint for all those people out there who have ever gone outside of a primary relationship to meet a need. Especially for us overlooked women, who don't even get our own patron saint if we're unhappily married.
And, in a mild attempt at self portraiture-
Now if only the rain would die down I could bike home and call it a day. Although the sun shines gloriously through a couple times an hour-
As I have just been knocked on my ass by a wicked case of tonsillitis, and have been feeling super guilty about not getting work done because I have been in bed for days, it's good to remember that I don't have to be perfect all the time. Or even most of the time.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch People
An exhibition and faux documentary by artist Jodi Sharp
Concordia Library, 1400 De Maisonneuve W. 2nd Floor
May 23- June 30, 2013
In affiliation with Concordia University, artist Jodi Sharp presents The Great Pacific Garbage Patch People, an exhibition and faux documentary about environmental sustainability and the possibilities of the universe.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch People is a project dealing with the very real issue of garbage patches in the oceans; areas of the sea where huge amounts of garbage has collected due to current eddies. When faced with environmental devastation such as these areas, it is easy to become overwhelmed and despondent about such issues. The exhibition Garbage Patch People seeks to create a world of imagination where anything is possible, even an unlikely conclusion to a catastrophic situation. For when we begin to approach devastating situations with creativity and hope, the possibilities for change truly are limitless.
Although most clips were ripped and culture-jammed from various sources, (list available upon request) my own actors and voice actors are as follows-
Starting to add geodes and other rocks into stain glass! To see the planning for this project go here.
So much fun!
Pretty soon I'm going to start experimenting with putting some semi-transparant ceramic pieces into stain glass as well. The wonderful artist Robyn Crouch has donated a couple of pieces for me to start playing with. Her work looks like this-
Another fun project that happened recently was being a model for Dylan Davies and Ben Sanchez. We went out into the country and used a technique called light painting. I stood really still (or moved) during a long exposure camera shot while Ben and Dylan "painted" in the light source. It was super cool and some of the images where amazing! I might use some of this technique in my own work.
One of the greatest things about being an artist, is all of the other artists I know that I get to share ideas with, collaborate with, or in the case of Natalie, become a sculpture for.
Natalie's doing a super cool project working with people and place. She takes high quality photos like this-
Then she walks around the neighbourhood of that person and takes pictures of buildings that are important to them. After her image gathering she meticulously prints and cuts paper sculptures of the buildings interacting with the image of the subject.
In the words of Natalie-
"What is your neighbourhood? The chaotic sprawl of urban skylines and alleyways is captured in the pop-up sculptures of ‘Terra Cognita’ – known land, marked territory, the many pieces of a person’s intimate geography they hold as the buildings closest to their hearts. ‘Terra Cognita’ is an ongoing series of photographic documentation of the neighbourhoods people create around themselves. Each person’s personal Montreal was collected by Natalie Draz through a series of meetings and neighbourhood walks. As the body physically unfolds it reveals through photographs a visual kinetic document of the navigation of a single person through her or his personal map of Montreal.
Using photography, papercutting and paper engineering as both sculptural elements and a documentary practice,Terra Cognita captures the iconic architecture that becomes a person’s intimate mythology of their space - the liminal place between the interior self and the exterior neighbourhoods of personal geography. Inspired by medieval mythology of sleeping giants and defeated dragons forming the hills upon which towns are built, each of the people becomes the landscape upon which their cartographic identity extends from."
I Love You The Distance Between Paris and New York
I would fold
a thousand paper cranes
for you,
would fight away all those demons
that leave scratches over your skin
just so that you know
that they don’t leave
through bloody trails.
I look at you and see all the ways
a soul can bruise, and I wish
I could sink my hands into your flesh
and light lanterns along your spine
so you know that there’s nothing
but light
when I see you.
Listen.
When the wind blows
all your candles out, when the stars
turn to plumes of smoke,
when your mother makes you watch
all the matches burn out in her eyes,
Let me hold your hand, your skin,
the stones you’ve swallowed in your sleep.
Let me
slip your soul out of your skin
so you can sleep in my palms
for tonight.
The summer has begun! I just finished doing two festivals in two weekends with a great amount of success. I feel reset and ready to get back at it!
Photo by Luke GS
^ The Fires of Beltane Festival, in Edmonton Alberta, on the Stonehenge property. Deco by Dylan Toymaker. Currently at the moment of this photo was DJ Forage.
Photo by someone with my camera. :)
^ May the Fourth be With You, the annual Blossom Party held in Alexandria, Ontario by the Bourdon family. Deco by me, with Lazers by Deglazer Lazer, and projections by Jody McIntyre. Djs included Sam Vipond, Alex Bourdon, BNNDY, Pope Biancus I, Dikran Poladian, among others.
you loved god because you loved poems and because you knew you were not alright somehow there was an overkill in you somehow you read a thousand books and god was the best dramatist god had your free hand and you took his will to get it back you two didn’t know what to make of each other you and god were like two children in the park purple and faint-hearted, learning to share toys god gave you every unfair advantage you were his blue chip, his crackerjack he made you irresistible and impossible he made you handsome but wanted you sexless he had you smart but tasteless, a navel, a naked hip, a man of god, a eunuch, a lazaret i was a glory hole too all the sick boys loved me
you were a fine missionary you blessed and lay your hands on the heads of the lost and the sick and the poor who really just wanted to be held, be kept, be kissed by someone like you and i suppose that’s where i made most of my mistakes i gave everything away
i met you on a busy street i was standing in traffic selling eve's apples i remember i was wearing a short skirt and love bites my heart on a sandwich board
you were really pretty solar, and like a boy madonna bibles under your arm, your hair gelled back, wearing a tailored suit and you swore they made you stupid no matter how well-cut and stylish and unbusiness-like they were you said, that's my theory on how they got oscar wilde, actually -- a whole lifetime of wearing simply fabulous suits began to fuck up his brain and make him careless
i said excuse me one minute a lady with her window rolled down was waving a dollar bill at me you smiled, took an apple from my backpack, untucked your shirt and shined it handed it to the lady, nodded good day and i thought, oh lord, i am flirting with the most unusual evangel we spent the rest of that day shooting the universe back into the sky i talked too fast like you do
when you know all days like this end too early and like you do the moment you flash on the thought that each page has a folio, a number
you must memorize this one
you held my chin and told me to look around at everyone else in focus told me that no matter where we were we were always the most apparent people in sight
and we made the most holy love and drank like the fish that is god wondering if we could stop or why we should or if anyone cared to cure us of our highs and our lows we drank and forgot to fear him we drank to our overkill like god was a fish as if he would forgive us for being the same for acting skinless in his skin, for drinking to the disquiet endgame the fish and the world that is him you loved me because you loved poems because i had your original thoughts and i was most elegiac, because angels have to eat, because the broadest hint, the greyest area is between heaven and earth, him and me
and honey, we both love the sound of your voice but if you're in love, shouldn't you touch my face more?
i woke up with you in the afterlife once there were a hundred light bulbs hanging from the ceiling of our bedroom, they looked like glowbugs, there were photos of naked lovers on the walls, when i shook you, you wouldn’t wake, you bled the clear blue sky, i pulled my nightgown above my head, made up hymns, sang them loudly and terribly, i screamed to god i was sorry for tinkering with his child, i confessed it was an inside job, i crossed all the sundays off the calendar, i learned in you like a brick schoolhouse, i swore to him you flying light and starving for love you couldn't find anywhere else
you were dying and i swore at him
lord knows, i am the poster child of star-crossed love and god was behind the misuse of me, my sadness, my self-sacrificing virgin mary heart, my goodness and honesty it was him who took me and showed me how how to feed you and wipe your chin i am certain god made me this stubborn
but just this once he borrowed me peace and the ability to let you go like when you get to the last page of agood book and you know to read every last word carefully
he borrowed me the grip of reality, the cruelty of being alive, when your life is over
-Mandie
(girl I met at a slam poetry night, somewhere in Edmonton, 2007)
Having first become famous for their incredible low-fi choreography on treadmills, OK GO continues to astound and delight me. Their videos blow my mind!
I've posted this one before, but it's just so good!!
Even though Dove is a large corporation that also owns other companies like Axe body spray (which often presents women as sex objects), I still found this exercise as very beautiful and compelling one-
I have a friend Tad Hargrave who runs a business called Marketing for Hippies. He has been a long-standing advocate for radical business practices, and one of those practices he has talked to me about several times is the "pay-what-you-can" ethos. With this practice you offer a service, and instead of charging a fixed price for that service, you allow for the people to pay what they can for it. He has stated to me that, not only does this open up your services to people who might not be able to afford it, but it also allows for a naturally occurring sliding scale where some people will pay more, balancing out your income.
As people who are already in alternative spaces where incomes are not a solid concept to begin with, it can be very difficult to trust where your money will come from next. We currently live in a society where we are taught that we are lonely individuals who need to be able to take care of our own needs at any given time, but I think that those ideas need to change. Ideas of collaborative consumption and trust in our fellow humans are two things that I think we need to start seeing more of in our society. As I look around me I see that people who are putting their faith in these things, are being incredibly rewarded for their trust.
This is such a beautiful example of that from musician Amanda Palmer-
And a wonderful interview from Roo Rogers about the art of collaborative consumption-
The Garbage Project began for me out of an idea I took from Developmental Transformation Therapy (DvT). This is a type of drama therapy where you enter into play acting with a group of people, which inevitably brings up some of the issues you are dealing with. The idea is that, if we open our problems up to the ridiculousness of imagination, we will become comfortable with change and see that all of our problems are not as set in stone as we might think.
Taking that initial concept, I chose to work with something that is a real travesty our world is currently dealing with, namely the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch exists in an area of the ocean that, because of current patterns, collects and keeps an extremely high amount of plastic that won't break down. But the North Pacific Gyre doesn't only collect garbage. It also collects a huge amount of plant and sea life, and should be an incredibly vibrant ecosystem. Unfortunately, because of the plastic, large amounts of wildlife are being devastated.
When I think about issues like this, I become extremely stressed out. Having already cut buying useless plastics out of my life practice, as well as the other things I do to try to live an environmentally responsible life, like biking, living communally and eating a vegetarian diet, I get overly depressed about environmental problems like this. When I think about a problem that is this massive, I'm not quite sure what else I can do to help solve the problem.
So, taking the idea of DvT, I decided to put my imagination into action and play with an idea of what could be possible. I came up with the idea of the garbage solidifying into a land mass where a brand new type of aboriginal population was found. Although my imagination doesn't change what's actually happening, maybe with a little bit more play, humour and imagination around these issues we'll be able to come up with workable long term solutions.
For this exhibition, I am working on a faux documentary about the Garbage Patch People, photoshopped images of this "new population", making fake literature, as well as imitation artifacts from the Garbage Patch People culture.
Although most clips for the documentary were ripped and culture-jammed from various sources, (list available upon request) my own actors and voice actors are as follows-
Alex Wintschel- voice narration
Tye Walters as David Thompson
Jodi Sharp- Miai Berzina
Garbage Patch People Photo Models-
Aaron Ball
Iris Moore
