September 2023

Dear Readers,

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The question that arises after three years of the pandemic is, what has changed for artists and viewers as they emerge from the cocoon of the studio, the Zoom conversations, and the works done in solitude? 

Choreographer Mark Morris’s dance company celebrated 40 years of existence during the summer of 2023 after three years of working in isolation, perhaps the most difficult situation for artists who perform together. The company recently presented two programs of works at The Joyce Theater in New York City. During the pandemic, Morris choreographed and presented a series of dances via Zoom. He began one, Sunshine, thirty years ago as a tribute to minimalist dance and the kinds of works that were performed at the Judson Dance Theater in NYC. His dancers stepped, walked, ran, and hopped to Gene Autry’s “You Are My Sunshine,” never imagining that Morris would present this work as a video piece, edited by Colin Fowler, his music director. Another of Morris’s zoom works is "Lonely Fugue," in which the members of the Mark Morris Dance Group perform in their individual spaces to Mozart’s Fugue in C Minor. The isolation of the dancers recalls Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012), a pre-pandemic video installation in which Kjartansson and his friends perform music together in a dilapidated mansion in upstate New York, but each musician appears on a separate video screen. This sense of unity within isolation is prevalent in many of Morris’s video works. But, as we all move into a post-pandemic state, his new works celebrate the “liveness” and joyousness of the physical presence of dancers moving together and of musicians playing. The performance at The Joyce Theater was a passionate reaffirmation of the art, physicality and presence of “live” performance.

During the pandemic artist Liat Yossifor, sent a series of small oil paintings on paper to poet, writer, and curator Ed Schad, to which he responded with poems. From this exchange emerged their collaborative book, Letters Apart. Yossifor and Schad continue their conversation for TAS, touching on their work, how their collaboration is a timeline of the pandemic, and the intimacy of the relationships between the poems and the paintings.

Ross Gay is a poet who notices the minute details of his surroundings. In his conversation with artist Iva Gueorgieva, they touch on everything from words and moments, to the tear on a page in Alma Thomas’s Study for Resurrection, 1966, to the poet Ross Field’s book Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston. When Field wrote about Guston’s work, Guston responded in a letter, “I felt . . . as if we knew each other and had many discussions about painting and literature. In a word—I felt recognition.” What a perfect description of the dialogue between Gueorgieva and Gay, as the painter and the poet reflect on their mutual concerns.

During the summer of 2023, I collaborated with poet Opal Moore on a video work that contemplates the healing properties of light and color. I wanted to make a work that would talk about the way we could move forward after the last three years particularly in Atlanta where we both live and work. With sound and video by artist Nuno Veiga (from Lisbon, Portugal) and support from the Nexus Fund and the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York City, we were able to realize a new video, Color of Healing, that mixes poetry, painting, light, color, and sound, presented on the media bridge at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Veiga and I have never met in person due to the pandemic, yet this is our third collaboration. The curator of my exhibition Strata at the Centro de Arte e Cultura in Évora, Portugal commissioned Veiga to create three videos interpreting my work in dance. These will be seen in Atlanta at Core Dance in Winter 2024 for their program REEL Art Video Technology + Installation Art. Ironically, these videos would never have been realized except for the pandemic. Because I could not travel and never saw my exhibition installed, Veiga was commissioned to create these works.

I hope that these artworks and conversations give us what is needed for healing after the last three years.

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Many thanks to these artists, poets, videographers, and choreographers.

All my best,

Deanna

Deanna Sirlin 

Editor-in-Chief

The Art Section

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