A Place to Generate Culture: Mark Allen’s Machine Project

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By Kyle Alvarado

Artist Mark Allen, was invited to present at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts for its fifth and final Art Reach lecture of the spring semester.

In the hour-long discussion, Allen spoke to a crowd of 45 people about his California-based nonprofit community space, Machine Project. The space, formed about eight years ago, seeks to subvert the typical roles that occur between audience, art and artist—namely a lack of participation—while creating a unique environment for creativity to flourish. “It’s a machine for producing ideas and culture,” Allen said.

Presenting a variety of examples from past Machine Project events, Allen highlighted the unique nature of his foundation. With events ranging from a dog opera to a houseplant vacation, Allen is sure to make the explanation of events simple enough to be presented in the subject line of an email, but complex enough to engage the audience in a way that fosters deep discussion.

“The do-it-yourself element of Machine Project creates a different relationship and understanding of the knowledge,” Allen said. “It’s not about a set body of information that every person needs to get, but their engagement with the process.” He noted that a workshop titled “Confuse-a-Tron” had four simultaneous workshops: a Kimchi cooking class, a plant cloning workshop, an electronics course, and a tranimal makeup booth. (Tranimal is a branch of drag makeup that incorporates animals into the overall look.)

The “Confuse-a-Tron” is a prime example of his ability to create projects that are new, yet familiar, enjoyable, and clumsy—all at once. “It’s good to end up in all those quadrants. There’s something great about traditional knowledge,” Allen said. “But being awkward is not so bad…it gets to be a little interesting; shying away from discomfort limits your ability to experience new things.”

For more information on the Machine Project, please visit: machineproject.com

Photographed by Laura Bustillos

ReEntry

By Kathryn Smith McGlynn

ReEntry was the inaugural show for Frontera Repertory Theatre this weekend. The production team created a world of truth and investigation into the lives of marines. The time is present day and there is a war raging. Iraq, Afghanistan, take your pick. Parents, spouses and children see their loved ones deployed. Then there is the waiting…waiting for the soldiers to return. For the soldiers that go home, there is a process, a reentry to civilian life.

As opposed to a linear play where action happens sequentially, ReEntry is a docudrama whose dialogue is culled from hundreds of hours of interviews. The convention employed is the Joint Stock Method that ReEntry playwright Emily Ackerman uses with The Civilians. This is a piece that resonates alongside the El Paso community, as many residents are at least one or two degrees of separation from an enlisted soldier.

ReEntry shed a bit of light on the process of the military deployment and reentry experience from a soldier, commanding officer, and a family’s point of view.

ReEntry has been performed on military bases throughout the country to critical acclaim and Frontera Rep’s October production at Ft. Bliss and UTEP. This marked the play’s Southwest premiere. The first professional Equity company in West Texas, Frontera Rep is launching with the support of a creative partnership involving four entities: Frontera Rep, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), the Tom Lea Institute and Ft. Bliss.

Photographs courtesy of Frontera Rep Theater

The Barber of Seville

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By David Grabarkewitz

Nothing says “I love you” . . . like a hysterical comedy! However, that might not be true, depending on who you think you are. But for me, when I decided to program The Barber of Seville, I knew I could bring in some great comedians to make the experience unforgettable to El Paso.

The Barber of Seville (T.B.O.S.) is Gioachino Rossini’s comic classic with the famous aria that repeats the words, “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” This wacky aria starts off an opera that just gets zanier and zanier as the evening goes on, wrapping itself around a truly romantic love story.

The story is simple, but great. Rosina, who is 16 years old, is loved by the doctor, who is 70 years old. The doctor wants to marry her (No, we are not in Kansas in the 1970’s!). Rosina is in love with the Count, who is at least in the ballpark of her age, but he is in disguise so no one recognizes him. He needs help, and in comes “The Barber of Seville,” Figaro himself, to make things right.

I conceived this new production for New York Metropolitan Opera Star Vanessa Cariddi to reflect a world that combines The Munsters, The Addams Family, and Grand Opera. In other words, as seriously as we take this great piece of music, there is always a feeling that something goofy is going on underneath.

Here are some of the biographies of the all-star comedians El Paso Opera will bring to the Abraham Chavez Theater on March 14.

Vanessa Cariddi (Mezzo-soprano), made her professional operatic main stage debut at the Metropolitan Opera and subsequently performed Waltraute in Die Walküre on their tour to Japan. She made her title role debut in Carmen with New York City Opera and her debut with the Caramoor Festival singing the role of Gond in Donizetti’s Maria de Rohan, under the direction of Will Crutchfield. In addition, she has graced the stages of The Pittsburgh Opera as Maddalena in Rigoletto, and returned to the Caramoor Festival this past summer of 2011 as Little Buttercup in HMS Pinafore and as Hedwige in Guillaume Tell.

Michael Chioldi (American Baritone) has become one of North America’s most sought after young talents. He has sung a wide variety of operas with New York City Opera, including the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’Amore, Hansel and Gretel, Il Viaggio a Rheims, La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Carmen, Die Zauberflöte, Central Park, A Little Night Music, and L’Enfant et les Sortileges, which served as his debut with the company. In 2008, his performance of Sharpless in Madama Butterfly on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center earned him an Emmy® Award. He returns to El Paso Opera to sing Figaro, the title role in The Barber of Seville. Mr. Chioldi sang the role of the Count in El Paso Opera’s 2012 production of The Marriage of Figaro and also appeared in El Paso Opera’s OPERA FOR ALL! in 2009.

Matthew Chellis (Tenor) Career highlights have included Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Baron Lummer in Intermezzo, Trouffaldino in The Love For Three Oranges, Thespis/Mercure in Platée, Ugone in Flavio, Cascada in The Merry Widow (Live from Lincoln Center telecast), the Chevalier in The Dialogues of the Carmelites and Nanki-Poo in The Mikado with New York City Opera, Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, The Duke in Rigoletto with Greensboro Opera and the Teatro Colón de Bogotá (Colombia), Ernesto in Don Pasquale with Calgary Opera and Edmonton Opera, Ramiro in La Cenerentola with Opéra de Québec and Calgary Opera, Tamino in Die Zauberflöte and Tebaldo in I Capuleti e I Montecchi with Atlanta Opera, Andres in Wozzeck with Dallas Opera, and Pedrillo in Die Entführung Aus Dem Serail with Washington Opera.

Melissa Parks (El Paso native, Mezzo-soprano) recently made her Italian debut as Mrs. Lovett in SWEENEY TODD. Recent performances include a debut with the New York Philharmonic in the acclaimed production of Ligeti’s LE GRAND MACABRE with Maestro Alan Gilbert, a return to Utah Opera for Dame Quicky in FALSTAFF, Baba in THE MEDIUM with Michigan Opera Theatre, a reprise of the role of Mrs. Peachum in THE BEGGAR’S OPERA under the baton of Maestro Lorin Maazel at his Castleton Festival, Dame Quickly in FALSTAFF with Cleveland Opera, Zulma in L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI, Third Maid in ELEKTRA, and Dame Quickly in FALSTAFF with Seattle Opera, Marcellina in LE NOZZE DI FIGARO with Pittsburgh Opera, Madison Opera, and Michigan Opera Theatre, Azucena in IL TROVATORE with Michigan Opera Theater, and Erda in DAS RHEINGOLD with New Orleans Opera. Other engagements have included working with the Metropolitan Opera in both LA FILLE DU REGIMENT and AUFSTIEG UND FALL DER STADT MAHAGONNY.

David Grabarkewitz is the Artistic and General Director of the El Paso Opera. David is a contributing writer for Ave.

Photographs courtesy of El Paso Opera

The Power of Theater

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By Kathryn Smith-McGlynn, MFA MPA

I will never forget the moment I realized the true extent of the power of theatre. Studying and performing in Moscow, Russia with master drama teachers as part of the graduate MFA in Acting program at Carnegie Mellon University, I had the privilege of performing the role of Anna in Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths at the famed Moscow Art Theatre on the very stage the play premiered on in 1902 and in the very theatre where Constantin Stanislavsky and his pupil Anton Chekov collaborated.

Anna is part of a destitute motley crew living in squalor with her husband Kletsch. Sick with consumption, she wakes each morning fighting to live another day. Director Yuri Yeremin staged the play with audience members sitting onstage with the actors in an intimate setting. The relationship between the spectators and actors was organically integrated — the fourth wall broken. The audience could hear us breathing, feel the energy flowing from our bodies. When the time came for Anna to succumb to her inevitable death, as the actor, my body was laid on a table within arm’s reach of the audience. I heard sniffles and suddenly felt a hand rest gently upon my chest. The owner of the hand whispered, “shhhhh” as if to say, “rest, now.” Whether the audience member’s action was cathartic to herself, I do not know. But what I do know is for that moment and many other moments during subsequent performances, there was a connection between the actors and the audience.

It is believed that theatre brings the community together for a shared experience and may be compared to a religious or spiritual event, which is fitting considering the theatre tradition is as old as mankind itself. What began as ritual and ceremony has evolved into a discipline that delights the senses through genres such as tragedy, melodrama, comedy, musical theatre, avantgarde, performance art, social theatre, commedia dell’arte, puppetry, opera, pantomime, and even a combination thereof presented by companies such as Cirque Du Soleil. The moment the audience steps into a theatrical space, even as patrons settle into their seats with anticipation and actors prepare backstage for the curtain to rise, there is an unspeakable bond, a force that binds us together to share a unique experience and exchange of energy. That is the power of theatre.

Theatre is a mirror—a reflection, if you will—of humankind, a dramatization of our everyday lives. As an actor, I have always felt that the Holy Grail was to move the audience by my performance, to accept the staged reality that my character and the play exhibited. In many ways, this belief is one-sided because it does not acknowledge the audience’s role. There is a definite give and take between actor and spectator. While the actors onstage present the life of the play’s characters, the audience members either open to receive and accept that reality or not. If both parties play their respective roles truthfully, an exchange takes place, and it is this exchange and participation in a communal experience that culminates in something powerful: change. That theatre can be a catalyst for change is a topic much debated by theorists and practitioners. But research has shown that theatre can in fact change peoples’ attitudes, thoughts, and, quite possibly, actions.

John William Somers of the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter in the UK writes that “recent research confirms that the imagined world can impact on the individual personal story.” He asserts that “drama’s power to change attitudes is rooted in the notion of intertextuality, the dynamic relationship and intertwining of stories, [and] the interpenetration of the performed story with the story which forms the personal identity of the individual.” Meredith Yanchak notes in her article “The Impact of Theatre Education” (2010) that “Burke, Foucault and numerous other philosophers have always held that theatre brings people together and help them to identify with each other.”

There are an increasing number of cultural institutions in El Paso serving up an excitingly wide array of theatrical arts. From longstanding groups such as the El Paso Opera, UTEP’s Dance and Theatre Department, UTEP’s Dinner Theatre, El Paso Playhouse, Kids-N-Co, Shakespeare on the Rocks, and Viva! El Paso to emerging organizations like Frontera Repertory Theatre Company (the region’s first professional Equity company), The Border Theater, Green Apple Theatre Collective, and The Charming Elusive, each one of these institutions presents theatrical experiences as varied and nuanced as our unique, vibrant community. In a world where our thoughts are economized and truncated into sound bites, slang acronyms, and social networking character limits, we must relish the opportunity to commune to a place where we can sit back and leisurely witness the unfolding of stories that externalize our inner thoughts and emotions. The experience may just help us better understand ourselves and the people around us.

Kathryn Smith-McGlynn is an El Paso-based actress, scholar and writer. She is a veteran actress of stage, television, and film and is a Visiting Lecturer at UTEP and Co-Founding Artistic Director/Executive Producer at Frontera Repertory Theatre Company.

Ed Stewart

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By Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek

Kimberly: Art didn’t seem to be path your originally intended. How did your journeys take you down this path?

Ed: Until recently, I didn’t feel I ever really had or followed an intended path. When I was much younger I never mapped out my dreams or planned my life at all. If anything, I set some pretty modest goals and put effort into going after the things I really wanted. For the most part I have made decisions based on continuance and adventure. I felt lost for years and years. My current direction feels much more natural and fitting but it took a series of painful failures to get to this point. All the right things went wrong at just the right time and once the dust settled I began to make some better decisions and began to participate in life. I started drawing again and cutting really simple stencils to spray paint on whatever I could find. It was so fun and rewarding that I started making them all the time and I slowly started challenging myself to make them a little more detailed and intricate each time. When I wasn’t cutting stencils I would grab a stack of napkins and a brush pen and draw caricatures of people on the street, at bus stops, or I just made them up and it was those actions that made me feel purposeful and gave me a sense of direction. In hindsight and a little farther away from the end of that chaotic period I feel really grateful it all happened the way it did. Things had to happen exactly the way they did in order for me to be where I am now. Life is super fun now.

Kimberly: What art medium do you focus on? What has been the most rewarding?

Ed: The stencil art. It’s really gone way beyond my initial expectations and now I’m using more and various texture techniques, more layers, and mixing it up quite a bit with that medium. I’m totally falling in love with printmaking though. I’m about to finish my first printmaking class at UTEP and I easily see myself doing a lot more relief prints and/or serigraphs from here on; so tedious and process heavy but so beautiful when it goes right. All analog, all the time.

Kimberly: What are your goals and how do you plan to achieve them?

Ed: To unlearn and trash what no longer works in my life and keep what does; to keep moving forward in all areas of life. I’d be thrilled to earn a fine arts degree, I’m taking it slow and trying to actually absorb it all and take advantage of what the studios and professors have to offer. I don’t really have a certain goal in mind, I want to do a lot of things. If I really want it, I’ll work hard and do what it takes to get it. Being a sailor and a trucker gave me a work ethic second to none.

For more on Ed, see our May issue.

Photographed by Laura Bustillos

Sculpting a Legacy

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By Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek

From the east to the west coast artist and professor, Ray Parish’s sculptures and towering installations have been featured in galleries, museums, and universities in over ten states with a transposition in Berlin, Germany.

Parish’s own college days positioned him at Ole Miss on a football scholarship; however after a series of concussions he shifted to a safer path, the fine arts. “I was exposed to art at a very early age. My uncle attended art school and my grandmother painted. They would show me books on Rembrandt. I was surrounded by modernism so my thinking followed. My sculpture is abstract and I’ve been very comfortable with the nature of my work,” noted Parish.

“I enrolled at UTEP to study art specifically from Professor Parish. I was a self proclaimed musician, never took an art class in my life, but I knew I could draw and build things and I was good with my hands. I was told, Ray would be the one who could mold me, “ noted David Quinn, former student of Parish and current art teacher at El Paso High.

“I once overheard Ray retell of his sudden epiphanies where he described a ‘magic’ that can occur in the simplest of forms. This was a silent, yet deafening communication able to undeniably penetrate the soul of a person willing to see or just look at that object. An object being something that doesn’t even need to have an intended meaning or purpose,” said Quinn.

Twenty-nine years after his educational career started Ray Parish is hanging up his professorial title in sculpture. He leaves UTEP this month after teaching thousands of students over the course for almost three decades. “I tried to impress upon my students the importance to understand the history of art. One should respond to artwork in respect to the context. They relate, one must physically, emotionally, and intellectually connect to their own work,” Parish stated.

Over the years he dabbled in conceptual installations, photographed dissolving parts in the Pacific Ocean, and presented a collection of hay bales in an art museum. “There was just something to be said about the thought of a pristine environment now tainted with by hay,” laughed Ray.

It was during his exploration of several mediums that Parish became exposed to sculpture, his main genre, and began to discover the multiple facets that could be achieved in his works. He experimented with grafting trees, currently a living installation piece in front of the Don Haskins Center; constructed pieces large and small while utilizing cedar, stainless steel, oak and most recently, concrete and steel. “I am obsessed with trailers. In Art In, I took an old camper and pulled everything out of it, revamped it, and then created a live installation with wax people inside and had the television on. It made the viewers feel like they were intruding on something. In Undeterred, I took another steel camper and dropped a piano on top of it, that was great,” he satisfyingly said. There seems to be no size limitation to his projects fabricated steel.

When asked of the legacy he built, he replied, “I am afraid it doesn’t matter what I want to leave. In a couple of years, you are gone and that’s sad, but I am prepared to deal with that. I think I have created an effective arena where students can express, learn, and develop their creations. You can’t teach a person to be an artist, but you can provide the necessary conditions.”

Parish feels he is graduating UTEP with a degree of his own, “I think I covered it all. I brought in artist that needed to know how to express their technical aspects. I’ve nurtured students through commission work and job situations, I have covered the bases, and I will continue to be a part of the BAR. “ Parish refers to the Border Art Residency which was founded in 1997 by Parish, his wife Becky, and in conjunction with the El Paso Community Foundation to help support artist. He designed the program to offer a selected artist a spacious creative living and studio space in La Union, New Mexico. The artist can use his/her specified time at the BAR to cultivate their creative talents.

As UTEP’s spring session closes, so does one door for Professor Parish, yet his path to another avenue allow him greater time to vacation in his favorite spot, Puerto Peñasco, Mexico. “I just love it there. It’s not all day at the beach, believe it or not, I work on projects. I am building a wall right now at our house and inserting blue glass bottles throughout the concrete walls. It’ll stand as an installation of its own,” Parish excitedly says. His story as an educator may end but the knowledge and inspiration he imparted carries on even as he leaves the university.

Photographed by Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek, Peter Svarzbein, and Victor Beckmann

Sebastian

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Laura Bustillos gets an exclusive look behind the scenes of Mexican sculptor Sebastian and his latest work, La Equis in Ciudad Juarez.

Photographed by Laura Bustillos

And This Is Another Space We Have Made

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By Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek and Kyle Alvarado

Billingsley said El Pasoans who supported him through the Border Art Residency program helped him realize that contemporary art matters in the region. In a more intimate note they showed him that his work is relevant and capable of generating interest.

Billingsley said. “There was a moment in there where I became aware of how many people really seemed to care about contemporary art, whether they liked my stuff or not, and it made me feel like I was making some sort of difference.”

Billingsley’s paintings strike the viewer in a unique way. He utilizes a piping bag, like one used on a cake, with a mixture of acrylic and house paint. He notes that the consistency of this mixture is almost like painting with water. As the paint leaves the controlled confines of the bag and settles onto the wide-open canvas, something interesting happens—gravity will affect the line. It will spread out and settle in an unpredictable manner. This unpredictable thread carries into Billingsley’s striking sculptures.

Utilizing expanding foam and plaster bandages he constructs colorful abstractions of the human form. “The decision making process has to be fast. Foam is going to be in an organic form and bubbly. It expands 18 times its size. You can’t always control it,” He said. “Its unpredictability creates growth in terms of actual sculpture giving mass. You can put together a whole human form through blobby noise. Your mind puts the rest of the body/art work together.”

Read more in our May Issue.

Photographed by Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek and Peter Svarzbein

Claire Lippmann

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Traces of Wind and Bone

by Aracely Lazcano

With a soft voice and striking personality French-Mexican sculptor Claire Lippmann presented her latest collection at an exhibit sponsored by the Consulate General of Mexico and the University of Texas at El Paso.

“I speak with my hands and you listen with your eyes,” she said while addressing over 100 people gathered at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. The event was in observance of the Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Traces of Wind and Bone incorporates a series of contemporary pieces of ceramics, pottery, and sculptures. The artist works with natural elements such as clay, water, air, and fire to reflect on the origins of mankind. Each of her pieces is unique and combines to perfection soft earth tones, organic materials and a minimalistic style. “I wanted to present a very natural collection, subtle and transparent,” Lippman tells us.

Lippmann stated her recent work is inspired in a recollection of her inner needs. “I wanted to show abstract pieces instead of figurative ones because it is something you don’t see everywhere, you need to look at them within yourself.”

Her work is in perfect harmony with the origins of evolution and reflects the docility, serenity, and beauty it generates. This exhibit was made possible to the generous support of the Sebastian Cultural Foundation, the Texas Commission of Arts and the Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. Born in Paris, France, from a British mother and a Polish father, Claire Lippmann came to the United States to study psychology in New York, but while visiting a friend’s house, she fell in love with the work of Mexican ceramist master Gustavo Perez. “My friend told me he was spending the night at his place and I got to know him.” Perez was later impressed with a note she left at a guest book during one of his exhibits. He fell compelled by her words and admiration; he decided to invite her to be his apprentice. Lippmann immediately accepted and moved to Jalapa, Veracruz, a coastal state southeast Mexico. There she has spent over a decade learning the secrets of ceramics. “Clay never let me go, the day I touched it, it was a revelation,” she concluded.

Lippmann has shown her work in Washington D.C., New York, Brazil, Spain and Mexico. Her latest collection of nest and shells, cellular pieces, weaving and stoneware mounted on cotton can be admired from May 6th to July 19th at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts Gallery.

For additional information you can call (915)747-6151 or send an email at rubincenter@utep.edu.

Photographs by Laura Bustillos

Silence Lord of the Mind: A Critique

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“Silence Lord of the Mind”, by Paola Rascon, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 1.8m x 2m

Observing this piece, we begin to see the process in which the artist is engaged with the work. For example, in this painting, the gestural engagement and process of the artist is very evident here. The gestures and marks move over the figure in some cases, especially the top layer of spray-painted text, which helps integrate the figure into the abstract gestural.

The other quality of the work she engaged in is the use of words and how these might reinforce the understanding of the painting in the context of the iconographic elements. What the artist is trying to do is tell a narrative about this person. Typically stories are told with words independent of images, however in the figure with the yellow cap the superimposed text adds another method as to how the viewer might ascertain meaning. In this painting, it suggests some psychological state, or silence of the mind.

(The Art Avenue): [Reading and translating the words on the painting] “Thinking” and “sentiments” …“Science equals the destruction of heirs”… “The truth has not been discovered…”

The artist, by doing so, heightens the subject matter. Perhaps it has something to do with the figure that, in my estimation, appears to be homeless he has a grocery cart and an idea of unjust treatment by society, the truth of that needs to be further examined.

I think this painting is the strong. I feel the activity of making the other painting, the gesture, the descriptive marks that go into defining the portrait have a greater amount of virtuosity. Nevertheless, it’s clear the artist, as an overall theme, is interested in these portraits of people that have some relationship to the street and sharing their story.

We are much more aware of the aggressive marks used to model it; while at the same time, the strokes are smaller and intricate over the gestural activity. It is a little bit different; I don’t quite see the artist having the same sense of intimacy or having the same affection for the viewer. The figure in the portrait is staring us right in the face; that sort of sensitivity does not have a place in the kind of view she chose for this portrait.

This paintings demand time is spent in order to search and discover all the clues. Every artist hopes that people will take the time to examine and uncover their work. Her use of text is very powerful. It engages the viewer in another way, which is reading and trying to understand and interpret the meaning of the words. I think she is successful in her use of words in this painting. I should note that the use of spray-paint for the text was very inventive. It makes you think of the street, graffiti, and things like that.

The real significant part is her subject; I think it is very powerful. An artist who has found a theme is extremely fortunate. That is the struggle of art; finding something to say that seems significant. I believe this content is meaningful. The artist addresses some of the social, political, and economical issues that plague our society. She takes her subjects personally, and voices their grievances to the community.

River Noble has exhibited his artwork nationally and internationally. Noble has taught at numerous institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Iowa, and the University of New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, BA; University of New Mexico, BFA; Saint Louis University, MA; and University of Chicago, MFA.

SILENCE LORD OF THE MIND 2 PR

 

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