A Solstice Greeting and Wish for You

Dear friends,

...dear beautiful people in my life... you all mean so much to me, you cannot know.

...this year I thought I had nothing to share (art or poem or video), but, then, Shadow Cave is about reaching into the darkness in ourselves and bringing what is hidden in us to light, which is sort of like the return of the sun in the darkest moment.

It's a small offering, and perhaps too long to watch. Don't worry if you don't, I don't mind and I'll still love you. I did subtitle it, so click on the cc if you'd like to read along, or translate into another language.


direct link: Shadow Cave

It's based on a real ritual I did in 1995 and wrote an extensive entry in my journal about. I re-wrote the ritual as a sort of modern fairy tale. It's about integrating ourselves at our deepest levels, however we image that. Sometimes what is in our shadows is not anything 'sinful' at all! It's only what we've repressed in ourselves... which could be our recognizing how luminescent we really are!

Shadows and dopple gangers appear in this videopoem, as ever. :) Please forgive. (I just can't help being multiple, ya know!)

I offer it to the light within us.

On this Solstice, Festival of the Lights, and for the auspicious coming year, many blessings to you, wishes for good health, prosperity, good fortune in work, relationships, family, and the success of all your creative endeavours,

love, Brenda

                              

Rehearsals for a videopoem

Perhaps I like to prevent the viewer from forming a generalized view of whatever my 'identity-presence' is. Part of this is accomplished through humour, which distances recursively, meaning boomerangs in its iterations. The selves operate this way. We are crowds. You, too, are composed of opposites and different stagnancies and transformations at various speeds in vectors as you focus in this moment, here. How often do we cystalize?

When are we ever all in one place?

At death, perhaps. But, by then, we have fled elsewhere.

So, rehearsals. Preparations for the public show. Experiments, tests, and yet are we not rehearsing every moment of our lives? Learning how to live. In our becoming art?


Rehearsal Two is what I thought I'd like to do. Strong light so you can see only half the face, all black otherwise. Both were shot with the internal iSight camera in the iMac, the first via Photobooth, and the second via iMovie. Not great detail, but ok for test runs.

In some ways I prefer the setting and tone of Rehearsal One, but the Two has a stark simplicity that I like too. Rehearsal Three, a combination of Rehearsal Two and another one I did in Photobooth is a bit strange, and my sense of humour has crept out. It's my favourite, however, and so I put it first.



Above, the link to the first rehearsal, when I hadn't quite memorized the prose poem.

Below, the one I did when I got home on Wednesday night, and that was turned into black and white for Rehearsal Three, up above.


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The final version of Voicings is here, and it is similar to Rehearsal Three above, only I didn't obscure the realism of the camera and instead allow myself to be seen.

Where I read the poem on an open stage:


Courtney Park Library, Nov. 26th - GREAT POETRY EVENT!

From left to right, Nik Beat, Brenda Clews, Brandon Pitts, ParisK Black, Jennifer Hosein, Tallulah Doll, and Susan Munro... Brandon's book of poetry, Pressure to Sing, was launched, and the rest of us read or recited or sang in an interspersed open stage (between the three book launches)... it was a great afternoon!

And a daytime shot like this... rare.

                              

PL: P(ink) L(ady)

direct link: PL: P(ink) L(ady)

PL: P(ink) L(ady)

once, the sakura tree
blossoming cloud 
of pink

blood,
like split cherries

a pulp of wounds

I, fleshy stone fruit
soft under his fists

brazen, the road
where I walk

brazen, my ripe cherry
nectar

-



A creative treatment on the theme of violence against women. The ending is meant to be positive - she's no longer hiding, is defiantly living from her source of nectar.

Shot with an iPhone4, and edited in FCE. The text had a lot of treatment, and took as long to create as the film itself. Normally I don't like text in videopoems, unless the text is a pictorial element in the composition.

The track, Chinese Sunrise, by bjarneo on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/bjarneo/bjarne-o-chinese-sunrise