Sticks and stones and tales of bones, Oct 27, 2006

“Skeleton Woman Come Out of the Closet” Thursday, November 2, 6–9pm, Magenta Gallery, Umarán 32

Theresa Sergneri joins Magenta’s co-op gallery members for this Día de los Muertos celebration. Bonnie Griffith will present her “collaged clothing” in black and white, along with sculpted wire skeleton figures in her jewelry case. Victoria Lynn Pierce shows new paintings of sticks/stones and bones in rich landscape abstractions. Rebecca Peterson shows new work in embellished nichos and small paintings in memory of her father, with the theme of crossings in boats. Barbara Roberts continues to exhibit her gorgeously rich hand-painted glassware, and Patrice Wynn will display her Day of the Dead skeleton design clothing from her exclusive line especially for this event. Rosa Torres shows her signature hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramics, made with clay dug by her from the land surrounding San Miguel—the earth we come from, and to which we return.

Skeleton Woman Comes Out of the Closet
By Theresa Sergneri

Once upon a time, in a marketplace south of the border, a little doll was found tangled and twisted in a basket. She was made of clay, wire and feathers...expressionless and abandoned.

I recognized her immediately. She spoke sweetly to my heart and soul as I, too, was lost and alone. I claimed her; together we would find our soulful home. 

Upon another adventure a tiny pair of red shoes was found and hope was kindled in my heart. I ran home—the shoe fit! Magic was born ...the alchemy of Love. Skeleton Woman came alive. The transformative power of Love, together with bits and pieces of this and that, made her into a beautiful symbol, a talisman from dark to light, a treasure from the underworld. Restored to her rightful place, she lives where all fairy tales merge and spin a new tale. She is the oracle that marks the path with heart—my heart returned to her rightful place. 

This is Skeleton Woman’s humble beginning. She is the story of a journey home—my journey. Life is full of mini deaths and births that when embraced can have a transformative power to teach and change one deeply and forever. Art and Myth are a way to look closely at this process through symbols. Entering the Shadow is a part of this process and is lonely at best. The fairy tale reveals a bit of light in this dark and foreboding underworld, and a story can restore perspective to the weary of heart.

The discovery of this little doll tied into the beautiful Inuit myth of Skeleton Woman, a story of Life from Death and the transformative power of Love. The fisherman overcame his fear of her and through love Skeleton Woman was fleshed out and love was born anew. The fairy tale and the doll are my companions, and we have rewritten my story.

Dolls can be talismans and are imbued with meaning, and as I created life from death in my own world this carried over to Skeleton Woman. I became the Gatherer. Everywhere I went I found beautiful things to make Skeleton Woman’s world and adorn her. Bits of clay and paint have taken her into new forms and ways of seeing this journey. She has slowly become fleshed out and has returned to the land of the living. Skeleton Woman tells of my personal story of transformation. Through the symbol of the doll I have embraced the changes in my life over the past few years. As with all stories they beg to be told. She comes out of the closet to tell her tale of the journey from dark to light and proclaims my personal decision to return also.

As La Huesera, Bone Woman, my primary work is finding objects that speak to my heart and soul. I gather that which is put in my path. The blessing of these objects comes into the realm of art when I create a new form.

The Love of gathering from nature was born in childhood and deepened as travel and adventure have brought many treasures to my watchful eye. For Day of the Dead I have created from these shells, feathers, sticks, thorns and bones a symbol of man’s return to the Tree of Life, the celebration of the formless into form. Come and see Skeleton Woman and The Tree of Life in honor of Day of the Dead. A time to celebrate all aspects of this wondrous life—dark and light, life and death, all part of the great tale we spin on planet earth.

Skeleton woman, inspired

The original Inuit myth, adapted from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes: 

Cast into the sea for doing something that displeased her father, the daughter was over time reduced to bones.

Later, she was caught by a fisherman who mistook her for a really big fish. Thrilled that he would be able to feed the whole tribe with such a huge catch, he reeled in the heavy weight, only to be horrified at the sight of the Skeleton Woman who rattled at the end of his hook. Panicked, he rowed and rowed to shore, but he could not get rid of the bones attached to his line. He finally made it to land and ran into his hut, dragging his fishing gear behind him. 

But Skeleton Woman had remained attached to his line, hooked. He screamed out when he found her there, tangled and twisted. Initially terrified, he eventually tried to get his line untangled from the bones. He then began to feel sad for the poor bones, and started to rearrange them a bit, into their proper order. Then he began to feel his own loneliness and, sad and lonely, fell asleep by the fire, the Skeleton next to him. A salty tear fell from his eye as he dreamed of his loneliness, and his desire for love; Skeleton Woman smelled the tear, and reaching over, licked it off his cheek.

The tear went down into her depths, and began to nourish her.

She felt his heart beating next to her, as he continued to cry of loneliness in his sleep. She borrowed the heart, and more tears, and as she put his heart into her breast, she began to flesh out. Curves grew back as her body took form around his heart and his sadness. Her own heart grew back. She became warm. She returned his heart to him, and feeling her warmth, he woke up to find a beautiful woman beside him.

He fell in love with her.

They were very happy together.

Santa Fe Workshops presentations continue

Lecture/photography presentations, Santa Fe Workshops Monday, October 30, 7:30pm, Teatro Ángela Peralta, Free

The photography presentations hosted by Santa Fe Workshops continue next Monday with work by Linde Waidhofer and Raúl Touzon. 

For Waidhofer, landscape photography is as much passion as profession. She works almost exclusively in color with state-of-the-art digital cameras. She has published three books of landscape photography: High Color; Red Rock, Blue Sky; and, most recently, Stone & Silence.

Waidhofer searches for the photographic equivalent of the emotional impact of wild and mysterious landscapes. She finds this equivalent in the secret geometry and design of the natural world, in images of simplicity and abstraction. 

Waidhofer’s stock photograpy is represented by the Telegraph Colour Library in London and online by Alamy.com. Her Western landscapes have appeared in National Geographic books and in magazines in Germany, Italy and the United States. She has photographed assignments from Japan and New Zealand to Alaska and the Alps.

Today, she lives near Crestone, in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, under the 14,000-foot summits of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, just north of the Great Sand Dunes, in a house she designed and built with her husband. 

[PIXART SANTA FE 2] Waidhofer’s latest photographic adventure has been an ongoing exploration of Patagonia, the southernmost end of South America, a landscape of incredible beauty, relatively unvisited, unknown and almost unphotographed. Presently she and her husband are building a home in Patagonia, living there half the year.

Raúl Touzon is a documentary and underwater photographer who specializes in making images that convey “the eternity of a moment.” Touzon has travelled extensively in Latin America documenting its cultures and building an extensive collection of dramatic photographs that have been used in many corporate and editorial publications, including Outdoor Photographer, National Geographic Traveler and National Geographic Magazine. 

During his years working for Eastman Kodak, Touzon developed corporate marketing strategies for advertising campaigns as well as taught seminars and workshops around the world. Most of his time with Kodak was spent as Director of Marketing for Kodak México. “I would have to say that these were the best years of my life and a pivotal point in my photographic career. I became obsessed with Mexico, and made a point of travelling to every state, but it was San Miguel that always held a special place in my heart,” he says.

It was this love for San Miguel that eight years ago motivated Touzon to suggest to Reid Callanan, Director of the Santa Fe Workshops, to start producing workshops here. Touzon spends most of his time teaching, not only in Mexico and the United States, but also in France, Spain and Italy. 

During the last couple of years, he has embarked on testing and applying new techniques to his underwater work, focusing mainly on sharks. “I have become fascinated by these creatures. My favorites are the great white sharks on the Island of Guadalupe in the Mexican Pacific.” 

Touzon also focuses a large part of his photographic career on stock photography for advertising and editorial projects. He is represented by the National Geographic Image Collection and Getty Images. 

The Santa Fe Workshops, an inspirational resource for image makers for the past 17 years, is a year-round educational center covering a wide range of topics in digital, black-and-white and color photography as well as year-round digital imaging programs. Each season, image makers of every kind travel to Santa Fe to engage their imaginations and rekindle their passions for photography. For information about these and other workshops in San Miguel, visit www.santafeworkshops.com 

Boldó, Takahashi and Litowitz at Mero
By Michelle Wey

Saturday, October 28, 7pm Mero Arte Contemporáneo, Zacateros 24

The objective of Mero Arte Contemporáneo, formerly known as Galería Wey, is to promote the work of artists with a unique personal vision, firm in the belief that not only are originality and beauty still possible in a post-postmodern world, they are the most important elements of creative expression. Mero Arte Contemporáneo presents a selection of works by three highly distinguished, mature artists: Jordi Boldó, Masako Takahashi and Laurie Litowitz.

Jordi Boldó was born in Barcelona, Spain, and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1957. He has been working with oil paint since adolescence. His artistic life has been a dedication to the pictorial possibilities of paint by way of a personal language expressed on canvas. Boldó’s paintings are charged with emotion while emanating a mysterious and self-possessed calm. They manage to present the dichotomy of a simplicity veering toward minimalism while offering the viewer all of the visual satisfaction of rich, textured paint surfaces that demonstrate this artist’s command of color and form. Boldó has enjoyed a long and productive career as a painter and has to his credit a long list of exhibitions in some of the most important galleries and museums in Mexico, as well as in other countries. 

Masako Takahashi was born in a US relocation center to Japanese-American parents and is a long-term resident of San Miguel. In her search for authentic artistic expression, she has developed a language that is entirely her own creation, in an effort to create a universal language that can be interpreted individually.

The means by which she does this places her firmly within the traditions of her cultural origins, as well as solidifying her stature as a contemporary artist working with nontraditional materials and techniques. Takahashi embroiders with hair, usually her own, creating a vocabulary that is determined by the length of an individual thread of hair. The effect is sublime, incredibly subtle and beautiful. Her hair embroideries are unique, feminine meditations that hold one’s attention in the quietest of ways. In this exhibition, Takahashi demonstrates her mastery of contemporary methods in art by presenting her classic hair imagery by way of digital reproduction. 

Laurie Litowitz was born in New York but has been living in Oaxaca for more than 20 years. Her talent lies in building bridges between cultures, techniques and materials, between ways of saying and ways of making. The panorama of Litowitz’s work reached another dimension when she began using found objects, sometimes organic, like mamey seeds and shells, or birds’ nests or sometimes plastic. These nontraditional materials became a tool by which to combine forms and meanings, cultures and traditions. Her work is distinctly feminine in its use of domestic craft and her tendency to work with repetitive images. The results are quietly and profoundly aesthetic. Her work is a wonderful combination of form and content, each informing the other, thus creating a type of hybrid language that is multicultural and sensually female.