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Altar No. 3: I Choose to Remember Us Whole
Altar Descriptions
and Map of Processional Route and Altar Locations
Valerie Curtis-Newton: The Wisdom Walk
How do we share wisdom across the ages?
How do we have fierce conversations with respect across generations? The fears around harm and cancel culture have amplified the breaches that fracture our wholeness. I wanted to thoughtfully interrogate the breach. I gathered a few of my colleagues to think about creating this altar. We came up with the The Wisdom Walk—a trek meditation on the sharing of wisdom and A Common Book of Wisdom: a community-generated sharing. The altar is made of sand/chalk, Mylar streamers, chimes, decorated bamboo drawing sticks and a book for collecting wisdom.
Made in collaboration with Sara Catherine Walsh, Nikki Yeboah and An-lin Dauber.
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Afroditi Psarra: Altar to Interdimensional Entanglements
How can we sense the invisible universe that surrounds our everyday existence through touch and presence? Can we envision a world in which technology is combined with craft to allow us to embody different timelines?
My altar reflects on the idea of portals as objects of intergenerational, interdimensional and celestial connections. It will materialize through a series of knitted tapestries which depict AI-generated images of portals imagined as tunnels, or caves, or black holes. Each tapestry acts like a touch/presence sensor which activates a sound recording of a radio signal which I have recorded through my research. When all the tapestries are activated I imagine a complex soundscape of radio waves. The sound is subtle as it will be coming out of small speakers, so it will be directional, once you move through you won’t be able to hear them clearly anymore. I chose to work with radio waves as it's both a natural phenomenon (electromagnetism exists everywhere in nature, the cosmos, our bodies, etc), but also a human made medium of communication. Radio has long been associated with extrasensorial activity, it is said that the first time that people heard AM radio they thought they were hearing voices from the past, and even to this day ghost detectors are primarily electromagnetic field detectors (radios that are tuned to a lower frequency than AM or FM). The use of textiles is a material choice that connects to the idea of embodied knowledge which carries histories of intergenerational practices, it refers to the multiplicity of bodies, and cultures that have inhabited this land, and it also symbolizes a way of physicalizing the fabric of spacetime.
Special thanks to Althea Rao for assisting with the production of this work, and to Sadaf Sadri for documentation.
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Leon Finley: Altar to The Death of The Sun
What will you become when the sun burns out?
My altar to the death of the sun is a container created as a place to meditate and contemplate the possibility of transmutation and transformation in the face of immense change and loss in our world. My materials are compost, energy and utterance.
The container was made in collaboration with Mel Carter.
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Althea Rao: Chestful of Whispers
"Giving birth" will become an option for me when______
or
I want to give birth to _________
In 1864, Asa Mercer set out to New England to court well-educated white women to move out to PNW, citing concerns of prosperity, as frontier Seattle did not have enough women suitable to become wives of the pioneers. These women were the original “Mercer Girls.”
The “Mercer girls” and local indigenous women gave birth to new lives and generations of families. They exercised their agency (or the lack thereof) differently, but the outcomes converged: in a time that was called “future” back then, the “now” we live in today. Now, facing polarizing politics, policing of bodies, as well as changing climates, we humans, collectively, might want to consider the future we would like to voluntarily give birth to and tenderly cultivate, both physically and conceptually, here and now.
If we collectively opt out
There will be no future generations
Would the universe mourn for us
Shall we perish?
Would the wind mourn for us?
Would trees and birds mourn for us?
Would rain and sky mourn for us?
Would our mothers mourn for us?
"Ha."
Sighs a significant piece of rock.
"What a human way of thinking about this.”
But still
The greatest power
We possess in our body
We can build futures
Simply by creating them
With our bodies
Or the power of our will
We have arrived
We are still arriving
Perhaps we won't give birth until we've arrived
Perhaps we will give birth to our own arrival
Listen to the whisper of the seed.
Made in collaboration with the UW Farm. Vocal performance by Kesha Monk. Special thanks to Tivon Rice, Adrienne Mackey, Zak Al-Haffar.
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Timothy White Eagle: Sacrifier Les Vivants
How do you surrender the known body? How do you prepare for evolution to a world as yet unseen?
An altar is a place of sanctification; we gather to sanctify, to make sacred this life, we celebrate all the foolishness of life and surrender our miseducated self, our comfort-addicted bodies, and having let go of this mortal coil, we trust in finding the unseen ladder.
Sitting at the crossed roads, an old man with a cane calls to the mountain, and time stops. The consorts gather, holding a ritual sacrament in preparation for the sacrifice, and time stops. A hosted ego death and metaphoric shedding of skin, body, and self. We are trusting that what remains, the eternal, will find its way.
In earlier private rituals, effigies of humanity are carved from fossilized earth and then transmuted in a fire dedicated to release. These effigies lay in the ash, and the consorts remove and prepare the effigies, and time stops.
Fossilized Diatoms, once alive and transmuted by death, millennia, and pressure, are freed and shed into the wind, and time stops.
The willing sacrifice of the fool self is offered, their head removed, and Time Stops.
Materials: Tableau Vivant, Diatomaceous earth, photography, ritual fire, and tricksters.
Made in collaboration with Adrain Chesser, Mandy Greer, Paul Margolis, Pepper Pepper, Ed Bourgeois, and Kate Lancour.
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About the Artists
Daniel Alexander Jones remains an unpredictable and unbound artist whose wildflower body of work is celebrated and respected by audiences and critics. Jones extends traditions of making rooted in Black & Queer histories of performance, music, literature and civic practice, adding his own specific contributions of Spirit, word and deed to the mix. 2023 marks Jones’s thirtieth year of professional practice and sees the release of his album, Aquarius; his presentation of “May As Well Be a Rainbow: The Toni Morrison Project” at the McCarter Theater as part of a major symposium in honor of Ms. Morrison; and Altar No. 3 at Meany Center for the Performing Arts/Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. Jones’s projects include Black Light (Public Theater); Duat (Soho Rep); and Phoenix Fabrik (Pillsbury House Theatre). As his alter-ego Jomama Jones, he was named “a true theatrical original” by Backstage Magazine, released six albums and toured widely. Jones’s TED Talk has amassed 400K views. His ongoing AltaredStates project, of which Altar No. 3 is a branch, is produced by CalArts’ Center for New Performance and may be explored at www.aten.life. Daniel Alexander Jones is a TED Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, a USA Artists Fellow, a two time Art Matters Grantee, an inaugural Creative Capital Grantee, an Alpert Award in the Arts Awardee, and has received several awards including the PEN/America Laura Pels Award in Theatre and the IDEA Award in Theatre among others. Jones is a Producing Artist at CalArts’ Center for New Performance and lives in Los Angeles, California. A collection of his plays and performance texts, Love Like Light, is available from 53rd State Press.
Valerie Curtis-Newton is the Head of Directing and Playwriting at the University of Washington’s School of Drama, Valerie also serves as the Artistic Director for The Hansberry Project. Her recent work includes The Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, Denver Center Theatre, West of Lenin, ArtsWest, Taper Forum, New York Theatre Workshop, among others. Valerie holds a BA from Holy Cross College and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Grant for Directors, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s Gielgud Directing Fellowship, Theatre Puget Sound’s Gregory Falls Award for Sustained Achievement, Seattle Times’ 13 Most Influential Citizens of the last decade, the Seattle Stranger Genius Award in Performance and the Crosscut Courage Award for Culture.
Leon Finley I am an interdisciplinary artist, Tarot and Akashic Records reader. I was born in Seattle—the traditional land of the Coast Salish Peoples—where I still live and work. As an artist, my work moves among performance, sculpture, drawing, sewing, writing and many places in between. I create art from my experience having a physical and spiritual body and from my experience as a queer and trans person. I explore relationships between all kinds of bodies: human, animal, plant, object, sound, energy and the unseen. I received my BFA in visual arts from Cooper Union in 2009 and my MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2012. I have shown my work in galleries across the country and in Seattle, including the Alice, The Jacob Lawrence Gallery and Oxbow. I have taught Sculpture and Performance at Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University and Montclair State University.
Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. Her practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of female (and feminized) bodies as matrices of information. Her work has been presented at international media art festivals such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, venues like Bozar, Onassis Stegi, EMST (Greek Museum of Contemporary Art), Walker Art Center, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts). She is originally from Athens, Greece and is currently based in Seattle, WA.
Mengxi Althea Rao designs activities and hypotheses that require voluntary efforts to overcome unnecessary obstacles. These activities and hypotheses offer rehearsals for the now we live in and/or the future(s) we are headed towards. Her works facilitate conditions (managing risks and rewards) to draw people into these activities in the hope that they will find these experiences rewarding, in ways of their choosing. Currently her thematic interests are: the feminist phenomenology of humans -- knowing, reproduction, life and death. Rao has lived and worked in China, Japan and the US. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at DXARTS in University of Washington.
Timothy White Eagle is a mixed race artist, a descendant of Scottish and Indigenous American ancestry. The roots of his work rise from a 30 year exploration of traditional ritual and embodiment practices. He creates experiences, installed spaces, photography and objects in service to communal healing. As a performer and one of the artistic directors, he toured internationally with Mac Arthur “Genius” Taylor Mac on his “ A 24 Decade History…”. He is a 2018 Western Arts Alliance/AIP career Launch Pad Award winner. In 2022 His original performance “The Indigo Room” appeared in NYC’s Under the Radar festival in 2023.