Dark Garden, a multi disciplinary artistic system, is a fusion of sacred space, digital art, and live vocal performance. Gardens in all cultures and spiritual traditions carry an important archetypal meaning of goodness, safety and fecundity. They are symbolic of the abundant earth, but also imply the human need to intentionally control and subjugate nature. Dark Garden seeks the mysteries of existence. Being here. On this planet. That humans contain a myriad of opposites. That the human race could become extinct. That we seem to be creating this extinction. And is that actually the end of our beingness? Graphic designer and media artist Dongwhi Han with creator/composer and Grammy winning cellist Leah Coloff will be transforming, transmuting and blooming Mary Ellen Solt’s concrete poetry into a living, evolving “garden” as a radical act of potential unpredictable positive creative change.
Music composed by Leah Coloff
Projection Design by Donghwhi Han
Animations of Mary Ellen Solt’s concrete poems from Flowers In Concrete created by Leah Coloff in MAX MSP/JITTER with assistance from John Jannone
Vocal performance: Jay Reinier, Eamon Fogerty, geo blake, Leah Coloff
Creators
Donghwi Han is a Korean graphic designer and media artist that creates theater plays and performances using new and interactive graphics.
In December 2021 he directed Little child, production of Yeonjak and written by Anthony Kim at Ansan Arts Center in Korea.
He designed a concept of virtual space for WEATHER# online multimedia opera, Spoleto, Italy in 2021.
Donghwi directed the media facade opening show, a culture night in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju, in 2021.
He curated and designed an art concept of exhibition which is called ‘Relationship and distance’ with team <관사거기> in Seoul.
He designed an art concept of Telematic Embrace, a telematic performance performed live online.
Donghwi holds a BFA from the Seoul Institute of the art in the School of Media Arts Visual Design and an ADA from the School of Design, the Seoul Institute of the arts
https://www.donghwihan24.com/21
Leah Coloff is a Grammy winning cellist, singer/songwriter, composer and creator. Raised near Seattle, Washington, her classical roots collide with 70’s rock and a pioneer spirit creating her self-identified style, CLUNK (Classical + Punk) with songs and works that are honest, sensual, funny, brutal, pissed-off, beautiful and chilly sweet.
Leah’s most recent venture combining music and performance, Super Second Rate, a one person show mixing various genres of music, songwriting and storytelling, debuted at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 and was dubbed “highly recommended.” Fringe Review stated , “The music ebbs and flows, as do the stories. She is a vibrant and captivating storyteller.” And Edinburgh Festivals Magazine declared, “I would happily listen to this soundtrack that pushed my perceptions of how a cello can fit within different musical genres.”
http://leahcoloff.com
Vocalists
geo blake, with a background in communication, gender, and vocal performance, investigates relationships through an ever-evolving cocktail of media. Undoubtedly inspired by their upbringing in las vegas, blake utilizes sound, light, movement, and handmade materials to interrogate paradoxes in identity and culture. By closely examining power, sex, movement, and transaction, they invite their audiences to explore new worlds they build both on stage and in private.
Jay Reinier‘s work tightropes the boundary between speech and sound, often taking the form of creative/critical hypertexts, performances, and installations. Inspired by posthumanist ideas, they challenge anthropocentrism, using technology and multimedia to articulate technological, ghostly ways of being. Jay studied music, technology, and literature at Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Eamon Fogarty Eamon Fogarty is a singer composer and multidisciplinary artist from New Hampshire. His work is interested in the political value of incomprehensibility and the speed at which language erodes. He has composed, recorded, and performed in a broad range of capacities and contexts, including numerous bands, choral groups, free improvisatory ensembles, puppet theater productions, and even a surf video or two. He currently lives in New York City.
https://www.eamonfogarty.com/
Mary Ellen Solt and Concrete Poetry
Mary Ellen Solt’s Flowers in Concrete inspired this installation/performance venture because, as Solt says, “…the concrete poet seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion, and repetitious emotional content.”
These poems beautifully upend the language that prevents us from fully taking in the existential crises of climate change.
Solt began writing concrete poetry in the 1960s and became a leader of the concrete poetry movement, coediting the influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968) with Willis Barnstone. She is the author of the poetry collections Flowers in Concrete (1966), Marriage: A Code Poem (1976), and The Peoplemover 1968: A Demonstration Poem (1978), as well as the poetry pamphlet A Trilogy of Rain (1970). Her concrete poetry has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. An essay of hers is included in the 1990 exhibit catalog Robert Lax and Concrete Poetry (1990).
(taken from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-ellen-solt– read more!)
from Mary Ellen Solt-Toward a Theory Of Concrete Poetry edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa
A note about the music
Mary Ellen Solt said of her process in creating Flowers in Concrete, “I attempted to relate the word as object to the object to which it refers by studying the law of growth of the flower and making a visual equivalent.” The music composed from the poems attempts to devise the sound equivalent by applying the visual and rhythmic forms of the poems to a choir of human voices. I want the poems to echo through sound waves as Solt used words as object to echo the flower as object.
All of the sounds backing up the live vocals are sound recordings from National Parks in the United States and were found in the National Park Service Sound Gallery.
special thanks
to our particular PIMA cohort, all the cohorts who have come before and the artists who find their way to PIMA.
to all of the professors who purposely or inadvertently teach in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts Program at Brooklyn College-
in particular, Jenn McCoy, John Jannone, Ben Vida, Ayana Evans, Erwin Mass
~ A Multidisciplinary Fusion Of Sacred Space, Digital Art And Live Vocal Performance ~ 