EVOCO PROJECT IS …

three steps of beauty

The Evoco project is an ongoing, multi phase project about how we create, hold, interpret and alter memory, as subjective experience and as a neurological process. In this increasingly digitally connected and socially dis/connected world, the group experienced event are held with greater regard, especially as the incident is recounted, recorded, retold, reposted and more. We are coming to accept as greater truth, the reproduction of aggregate fragments, collected over repeated replication. At the same time, neurologically memory is constantly altered, with each recollection, some neural pathways are strengthened while others atrophy. With each remembrance, some details fade and others expand. Every recollection mutates the memory further and further from original moment’s experience.

It is so with moments of beauty, trauma, pleasure and grief.

Evoco in Latin may mean: recall to the colors, draw out, draw on, call forth, lure/entice out, summon, produce, evoke.

Evoco Project begins with an incident that is witnessed by many. A dancer’s form is altered with flowers. Movement limited and altered. Their body is then painted with sumi. Impressions from the incident is recorded on paper. Then the impressions are interpreted later in recollection and marked with gold leaf and paint. That is then interpreted by silk craftsman and framed in a scroll.

The Evoco project is an ongoing, multi phase project about how we create, hold, interpret and alter memory, as subjective experience and as a neurological process.

Evoco occurrences:

June 2014. San Francisco. Asian Art Museum
November 2013. Oaxaca, Mexico. As component of Bridge of Mud and Feathers. Dia de los Muertos. Gorilla Galerie
September 2013. Oakland, Ca. Dana Davis Photo Studio
May 2013. Gothenburg, Sweden. Canevaz Gallery
December 2012. London. Private collector’s home.
October 2012. San Francisco. Still Motion Studio
September 2012. Tokyo, Japan. Sadistic Circus by Vanilla Gallery.
May 2011. Stockholm, Norway. In the woods for a community art project.
November 2009. Copenhagen. Manifest Party

Artist’s Statement

The Evoco project is an ongoing and multi phase project about how we create, hold, interpret and alter memory, as subjective experience/phenomenon, and as a neurological process. In this increasingly digitally connected and socially dis/connected world, the group experienced events are held with greater regard, especially as the incident is recounted, recorded, retold, reposted and more. We are coming to accept that the reproduction of aggregate fragments, collected over repeated replication, to reach some greater truth. Yet neurologically memory is constantly altered, with each recollection, some neural pathways are strengthened while others atrophy. With each remembrance, some details fade and others expand. Every recollection mutates the memory further and further from original moment’s experience.

It is so with moments of beauty, trauma, pleasure and grief.

Evoco in Latin may mean: recall to the colors, to draw out, draw on, call forth, lure/entice out, summon, produce, evoke.

Evoco Project begins with an incident. This has taken place in San Francisco, Phoenix, Copenhagen, Stockholm, London and Tokyo so far. Other cities are in the works. Sometimes it’s a public performance; often it’s a private invitation-only gathering. The guests are asked to be present and to enjoy the moment and the creation that will take place before them. They’re encouraged to create memory, to take pleasure in each other’s company, to make art of any sort, to capture the creation before them and create their memory. The witnesses are often invited to bring flowers or branches to contribute to the arrangement. Working with performer, I create a large flower arrangement with their body, flora and ropes in contorted forms of beauty, reflecting the season, location and my mood. I then paint the installation, body and all, with sumi ink. The scent of the flora, rope, skin and charcoal-based ink mix to create a verdant and earthy olfactory experience as well.

This is Phase 1.

Using the painted installation form I print portions of the body onto pieces of paper, capturing portions of the form, but like memory, never the totality of the form.

This is Phase 2.

The prints created there in each incident are collected and put aside, for months. Then I bring them out, and sit with the images, trying to recall what that moment was like. After some time of meditating on them, my mind begins to wonder, to free associate, to dream. With gold leaf and gold paint I embellish what comes forth. The gold leaf adhere like devotional acts of longing to a perfect past.

The gold leaf – Having been raised in a Japan, with its particular forms of austere Buddhism, I was taken aback by the devotional act of Buddhists in Thailand. They take small square pieces of gold foil and adhere them to the statues of Buddha and his aspects. What seems to me the blatantly worship an idol was challenging enough, now they were touching and altering original priceless artwork with the gold foil. The stone and bronze statues became golden and their contours changed with layer of gold. It seemed a desecration of the artist’s work. Over the years I’ve come to see the act as touching one’s mindfulness or intention. I’ve come to accept that the artist was not creating a unique piece precious in it’s original form, but a catalyst for connection and potential transcendence. The shape and image formed by the gold and the touch was the now. The past is forever altered through the action of touching it. It becomes its own unique venerated thing.

This is Phase 3.

Then the painting/print is delivered to a Chinese or Japanese scroll maker. Often I let the scroll maker choose the color of the brocade silk, letting them experience and interpret the piece, though I don’t tell them the history and provenance of the images.

This is Phase 4

In the end, what was originally a recording of an experience and artifact of memory is changed into an object entirely unique, creating new memories for those who encounter it.