Showing posts with label artist eviction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artist eviction. Show all posts

Monday, January 2, 2012

Art and Gift Part Three, Part two, A Voyage Begins

     I wrote last about the publication of my latest film in the making, Art and Gift. I remade that, and the result is somewhat different in sound, some added clips and images, more than that, the overall feel is in another realm not quite altogether, but there you simply must have it. My hope is that you will watch the new version, Art and Gift, A Voyage Begins, and that you might let me know what your thoughts are, either here or where it is posted.

    The third and final film in a trilogy telling of the gift of all my artwork to those who valued the work, thereby rescuing the art from landfill following one eviction too many from art studios, due to owner's plans for development of the property. After my eviction by a  landlord from the Dutch Boy paint factory art studios, I was given a much smaller space by my friend of twenty years, a friend who had collected much of my art. In order to make that move to a much smaller studio, I had to sell a great deal of my work at prices far below market value at the time of that move, which was almost six years ago. The space my friend offered me she offered at a price well below market value. Now ensconced in the old Bank of America building, my friend sadly died. Her son inherited, he "had other plans for the building," so once again I had to move. He kept the rent the same low amount I had paid his mother until the time of my move. He offered me another space in another building about 1/4 the size of the smaller space I had squeezed into after eviction from the Dutch Boy. With enough space for my work, the rent would have gone sky high, well beyond what I could have paid. Just finding space large enough would have been a dicey situation, one that I had explored to no avail, especially given that neither commercial nor residential rents have come down in my area, despite the near depression economy.
It is difficult to say in a situation like mine whether the tragedy is the loss of studio/gallery/work/storage (all of that is what a studio is or can be to a visual artist), or whether the tragedy is the necessity of saving work from land-fill by giving it to others. It is both. The loss is of countless hours of grueling intellectual and physical work that goes into the making of any art---in my case countless paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and the objects that go into the personal collection of an artist, all grist for the mill, all muse, all props that hold the theater together.

Paul Digby, Vincent Andelmoth, Aki Sasaki and friends, and Danny Zingarelli and friends created hauntingly beautiful music which graciously they allowed me to use in my film.

The poetry of Lucille Lang Day rings true and clear throughout the film.

Poet Mary Rudge speaks eloquently at film's end of changes and passages, "Every time a person dies, a book is lost."

I gave it all up for free!

Note: There are at least two places in this film where the sound got away from me in transit (upload)---my great desire is that these two places will be heard as very avante guarde sound sculpture.



Friday, December 9, 2011

A Nine-Month Project, Newly Released: Art and Gift

I have been working on this film the past nine months, complete and uploaded to Youtube. I invite you to click on the link and watch this film complete with interviews of those I gave my art to, and my landlord who evicted me.  The film can be seen at this link:  ***Art and Gift,***  a film by Chandra Garsson, featuring art by Chandra Garsson.



Featuring Poetry by Lucille Lang Day, music by Paul Digby (music), Vincent Andelmoth, (music, inCissorS), Aki Sasaki, (music,Escape (Window), Slave Unit), Egmont van Dyck, Jan Steckel,  Teresa LeYung Ryan,  many more:  ***Art and Gift***

Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Great Giveaway, Part One





         How to commemorate the Great Giveaway of nearly all of a lifetime of art? Especially as the huge physical push on the parts of myself and others that it entailed coincided with the Great Earthquake and Tsunami of Japan? That soon after beginning to realize what was happening there, one of the Great Nuclear Disasters in human history was taking place for the people of Japan? For the world?
          I felt guilty continuing to process all that I had been put through, all I was putting myself, friends, acquaintances through. For me this past eviction from my art studio and all I did to save my work from the dump will always be somehow preempted in my mind by tragedy on a scale of which my relatively small drama pales in comparison. It is just as when Pedro's and my exhibition at Deeproots, the reception of which was in the very week I realized that the studio I had occupied for the past twenty years would have to be vacated by Pedro and me despite more than five years fighting my landlord there, coincided with the breaching of the seawall that was Hurricane Katrina. How to properly address one's own personal tragedy in the face of catastrophic disaster affecting entire regions, an entire country, the world?
         I don't know, I suppose it's something to do with the famous selfishness by necessity of the artist.
         I blog, I have begun to work on a documentary film about this eviction, and the imperative of the art I had to give away, the imperative of the giving away of the art.

Painting, The Beating Heart of the Butterfly, owned by Lana Jean Rose