Lisa MacLean Artist

This was a small performance for Viernes de Dolores, the Friday of Sorrows that begins Semana Santa, inspired by the Guanajuato Virgen de Dolores altars. One of the most sumptuous and popular celebrations in Mexico is Semana Santa (Holy Week), which begins with the Viernes de Dolores (Friday of Our Lady of Sorrows), celebrated the last Friday of Lent. It is dedicated to the seven sorrows that Mary suffered before and after her son’s death. Widespread in Mexican homes in the 18th century, the tradition of putting up the altar of sorrows dates from the 16th century. The altar was meant to comfort the Virgin Mary, who eight days later would suffer at her son’s death. For more information on Guanajuato’s altars, click here and here.

Below are a few examples of public altars in Guanajuato: the first at a neighborhood fried chicken shop, the second at a funeral store where coffins are made, and the third in the lobby of a government building.

Our performance took place on the terrace entrance area of our colonial home and included floral elements, ribbons, masks, and lights

See more pics here.

Holy Week is a very big holiday in central Mexico and the festivities begin the week before Easter, with El Dia de las Flores (Day of the Flowers) and the Viernes de la Virgen de los Dolores (Friday of the Virgin of Sorrows). The Dia de las Flores (Thursday of the week before Palm Sunday) involves seemingly the entire city; a vast number of flower stands (fresh, paper, and fabric), as well as stands selling toys, Easter eggs, small animals, stuffed creatures and live ones (tiny turtles and hermit crabs), devil and demon masks, cow and steer carrying cases, and the like, are set up everywhere downtown. The whole city comes out to see and be seen and to purchase flowers and other accoutrements for their own Virgen de los Dolores altars. Using these supplies, altars to the Virgin (who is also the patron of miners, most important in this city of silver mines) are set up in public places (hotels, restaurants, churches, stores) and in private homes beginning on the Thursday before Palm Sunday.

For the Dia de las Flores, Ty and I decorated the front archways of our colonial house; using flowers, often symbolising the brevity and beauty of life, locally-made masks of Death (a tiny tin skull wearing a black sombrero), and the Devil (a papier mache horned demon mask), we reimagined the encounter of Death, the Devil, and the Maiden imagined so starkly in images such as those below by Hans Baldung Grien, and the great etching of The Knight, Death, and the Devil by Albrecht Durer.

Death and the Maiden by Hans Baldung, 1510

Death and the Maiden by Hans Baldung, 1518

“In this painting [above] a voluptuous young maiden turns to receive the kiss of her lover, only to discover, to her horror, Death. The skeletal figure gently holds her head, a gesture that belies the finality of his impending bite. His patches of wispy hair and rotting skin mock her flowing tresses and supple flesh. The dark setting, unnoticed at first, is a cemetery as she stands on a gravestone, perhaps her own. This Vanitas picture (an image that alludes to the transience of life) typifies Baldung’s predilection for erotically charged twists to more conventional themes, such as the Dance of Death. ” (Web Gallery of Art)

In Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) Durer shows his Knight steadfastly ignoring both Death, who shakes an hourglass in the Knight’s face, and the pig-nosed devil behind, grinning stupidly.

For more information on the Memento Mori, and other installations on this theme that I had done, click here and here.

See all the photos of the Guanajuato piece here.

Blue Star Bangalows is unique in Amed in having the most beautiful  large leafy tree on  the beach right in front of the restaurant.  It was this tree, and Barb and Tony lying beneath it, that initially attracted us  to this place on our first visit. The day had been very hot and dry and the tree beckoned us from afar like an oasis. No one knows what the name of this tree is but its leaves and branches provide a cool green-ness and shade from the hot Bali sun.

I had purchased skeins of coloured wool from a shop in Levuka, Fiji, intending to wrap a palm tree at the Beachouse, a project which I never got around to while we were in Fiji. But here the low hanging branches of this tree called out for colourful wrapping. After winding ten differently coloured skeins of wool around two branches, inspired by the bamboo pole decorations along the streets in east Bali, I also hung ten bamboo pinwheels obtained from the beachside cemetery on the same branches. These twirled and spun in the wind, looking very much like hands against the blue ocean and sky.

In the evening Ty and I hung up the coloured LED lights to illuminate the pinwheels; the lights also shone on the ground beneath with many varied hues.  The tree and its decorations then provided a theatre set upon which Barb and Komang enacted a stately dance, the colours tinting their faces and hands with a changing kaleidoscope of colour as they moved, effecting a kind of colour therapy. Many thanks to Barb and Komang for their performance!

Read more about colour therapy here.

See the complete set of photos here. If you use the slideshow function, you’ll get an impression of movement.

I am currently on a ten month trip around the world. After having seen the beautiful flower designs created in circular water bowls in Ubud, and seeing the two marble-topped tables sitting on the beach out in front of the Blue Star, Amed, Bali, I was inspired to create mandalas from whatever material could be found on and around the Jemeluk Bay beach.

I wandered up and down the beach collecting different coloured rocks, seed pods, shells, small bamboo offering baskets, bits of broken crockery, and flowers. These I arranged on the table top in concentric circles fanning out from a central core. Later, in the evening, I added small coloured LED lights that I’d brought from home to the composition. I also added some of the frangipani flowers that I’d picked up at Iluh’s place. The pieces looked beautiful against the dark blue of the sky and sea.

As I was working, several people, including the guys and gals at Blue Star Bungalows, came to see what I was up to, and posed in the background, the light colours illuminating their faces and hands in combinations of red, blue, purple and green. On the second evening, things got a bit hysterical, as Lole and Eka and others took turns posing as Count Dracula, with coral sticks as fangs, cackling and laughing in the night.

The following day, I put together a second set of mandalas, this time using some of the materials gathered from the beachside cemetery which Barb showed us.

There we found lots of dried offering baskets and quite a few more elaborate bamboo structures, all of which were used in burial services and left behind to disintegrate in the elements.

One of these mandalas includes part of a coconut tree, the part that holds the coconuts to the tree itself. It looks quite a bit like an asymmetrical tower, and is vaguely reminiscent of a Balinese cremation tower, the Wadah.

Like many things I work on, what starts out as a relatively straightforward project, both conceptually and compositionally, soon becomes something much more complex and even baroque. The first mandala was reasonably detailed, yet some of the marble table top was still visible. The second two almost completely covered the marble with an almost dizzying amount of beach rubble. In the evening, when the LED lights were inserted into the mix, the effect was striking, and more so when Ty and Wayan pretended they were horror show creatures prowling around the table. Fun and games on the beach!

See all of the pictures here and here.

Every time I read of yet another animal species headed for extinction I want to scream and tear my hair out. Please let us not preside over the greatest extinction event in history. I don’t want to be alone on the earth, with the only animals left our stuffed toys. Biodiversity matters!

While out skating around Stanley Park last weekend, I noticed that a striking structure of driftwood, branches and leaves had been erected on Third Beach. Friday, since the day was warm and dry, I decided to enact a small intervention into it with my stuffed animal biodiversity/species loss project. During the afternoon I hung up in the structure twenty-four stuffed animals, the animals representing species threatened or destined for extinction, as well as ones crafted in human imagination, and the number twenty four, the hours in a day, standing for the time span of human history.

Around the bottom of it I wove seven coloured crepe paper ribbons, each colour of the rainbow representing the days of the week. Together these suggest the time we have left to get it right, stop destroying animal habitats, change our habits and find a transformed relationship with the natural world of which we’re all a part.

While I was working on this piece, several people stopped by to chat; these included Joan, a Vancouverite now living in Switzerland back for a 50^th high school reunion, her friend Lori, and an unnamed Iranian expatriate. Joan mentioned Gauthier Chapelle as a person to check out, with his ideas of “Le Vivante”, the living. After having finished their walk, the two women returned with two colourful balloons for the interior of the piece. The Iranian fellow told me that the structure reminded him of the tents in which he used to sleep as a child (and said that the two snakes I’d included bothered him, since he had to be vigilant against them as a child in the Iranian countryside). But snakes, too, have their place in the balance of nature.

Later, at sunset, Ty and I returned with small LED lights and the juvenile mannequin, a symbol of the human, and installed these in the wooden frame as well. As the sun slipped down on the horizon,  the lights on the ships waiting to be unloaded came on and the moon came out, people rode by on their bikes, others gathered for a beach bonfire, and we all enjoyed the colours of the piece glowing against the darkness.

Read more about biodiversity here.

Read information about Gauthier Chapelle here.

See more pictures here.

Still working on the idea of the anatomy lesson, I decided to reconfigure the tableau to include one of the female mannequins that I acquired at the Eastside Culture Crawl and graffiti text from various places in the downtown eastside of Vancouver,  an area in the process of social evolution and gentrification, as a kind of anonymous “talk back” to the proceedings in the foreground. Since the anatomy theatre was a privileged space,  one from which the socially disadvantaged would have been excluded, I could imagine a group of the dispossessed pearing in through a window at the “lesson” and wondering what was going on.

See the rest here.

For technical assistance on this video, I’d like to thank Ty Nielson.

This installation is inspired by the 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn. I have used anatomical models and parts, mannequins, dolls and stuffed animals to recreate the anatomy theatre, an arena in which students and the general public would have had the opportunity to watch the official City Anatomist perform a dissection on an executed criminal. In my version, rather than having Dr Tulp perform the dissection, it is the anatomical model himself who is the surgeon general.

As the animation progresses the mannequin hands in the centre of the image hold up different body parts, mostly human but a few animal (as you can see in the image below where a sheep skull is being held aloft). The images projected on the wall include historical anatomical etchings from classic scientific texts and selected pictures from my previous work entitled La Specola, a series of digital image included in the Quintessence exhibit, curated by myself and Catherine Stewart, held at the Nanaimo Art Gallery. To see more images from and information about that show, click here.

To see all the still photographs, click here. Here is the original painting:

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp 1632

See more information on my anatomical art here. Read more about Rembrandt’s painting here and here.

“This Would Be Nothing Without You” was selected as one of the winners of the 2010 Digital Art.LA International Exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.

The selected winners will be exhibited as the central focus of the “Digital Art.LA” expo in a large group exhibit at the LACDA gallery (selected net.art entries will be exhibited on the artists’ websites). The show will be widely promoted and will include a reception for the artists in Los Angeles on Thursday Sept 9 (which I will attend). The expo screenings, exhibits and events are throughout the day and evening on September 9, 2010 (concurrent with and promoted by the Downtown Art Walk and the Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles). The winners exhibit will remain in the gallery September 9-October 2, 2010.

The 2010 Digital Art.LA International Juried Exhibit is curated by Peter Frank, Critic, Curator; Riverside Art Museum, California. The selected work is from a series entitled “Hanging by a Slender Thread”.

In addition, two other works from this series, “Landscape with Cowboys” and “Satyr v1″, have been selected for the international juried exhibition of electronic art organised by the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association. This exhibition, Matrices 2010, will be shown at the Danube Gallery, KAS Gallery, Hungarian Workshop Gallery, D-Court Gallery, and FISE Gallery in Budapest, Hungary from August until October 2010.

Los Angeles Center For Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
http://www.lacda.com/
http://digitalart.la/

See more information and work from this series here.

See more information about the exhibition here.

Here is the invitation for Matrices 2010, shows including my work currently being exhibited in galleries around Budapest.

Click here to see the catalogue.

Two of my digital photographs have been selected for the international juried exhibition of electronic art organised by the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association. Matrices 2010 will be shown at the Danube Gallery, KAS Gallery, Hungarian Workshop Gallery, D-Court Gallery, and FISE Gallery in Budapest, Hungary from August until October 2010.

Landscape with Cowboys

Satyr v 1

See more work from this series here.