welcome, double agent

www.bonfirebitumin.com is an evolving time-based visual work that investigates notions of self-rescue and how landscape is oft commandeered for this purpose.

IMPORTANT: Know that this work is impossible to view if you have not disabled “Block Pop-up Windows”. Also, your browser can effect how the piece executes. Firefox will provide the optimum results. Please understand that images surface and disappear as you view the work.

This project was commissioned by the Longwood Digital Matrix, Bronx Council of the Arts.
Selected artists were e-team, Jenny Polak, Mariam Ghani and Mary Walling-Blackburn. It was required that all works be web-based and have some conceptual relationship to escape. These works are now online and linked from http://www.longwoodcyber.org.

Judd Morrissey, artist and engineer of sorts, made this work possible.

Above: Flier for the first performance of “Left-Handed Saw Right-Handed” at Links Hall, Chicago, Illinois. This experimental theater piece was also performed at the Chicago Cultural Center in December of 2006.

Mary Walling Blackburn and Brian Torrey Scott present Left Handed Saw Right Handed, an abbreviated history of listening, which includes Apache dances, pro-war songs, and live orchestration by Samuel Wagster. Starring Dan Mohr and Jeff Harms.

This work was created within the Links Hall Director’s Residency, Chicago, Illinois, October 2005-April 2006.

Notes for the Performance as distributed to the audience in pamphlet form, here: left

The War and Empire Summer Drawing Lyceum
(Re-Drawing the Vietnam Conflict)

El Circulo De Dibujo proudly sponsors The War and Empire Summer Drawing Lyceum, an opportunity to draw a series of films made during the Vietnam War (1954-1975)*. We are curious as to how and why a society entertains/distracts itself while at war and wonder what we can infer about our culture’s relationship to state- sanctioned violence by visually examining the forms our distraction takes. As we watch, we will sketch that which we can rapidly commit to paper.

By foregoing our present war and selecting the Vietnam War as our central framing device, hopefully we give ourselves the benefit of historic distance and can begin to interpret the visual coding of fear and faith. Much of the cinema produced at that time can be easily quantified as escapist (“Sound of Music”) and/or extremely violent (“Bonnie and Clyde”). By gathering various artists together, to draw these movies as they watch them, El Circulo de Dibujo, has several aims:

1. To offer a space for discussion and problem solving around notions
of war and empire
2. To provide a social context for investigating the relationship
between cinematic entertainment and politics
3. To promote a deeper level of comprehension of our cultural tendencies
4. To document our findings and prepare them for public interpretation

Screenings are held in various places during the summer months.
Please bring any materials you will need to draw.

Screenings: Godzilla (1954), Sound of Music (1965), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Shooting (1967)

Participants: Mary Walling Blackburn (Organizer), Paul Chan, Joel Ferree, Shelley Jackson, Sameer Kapoor, Sean Meyer, Julia Shirar, Leejone Wong.

* Date provided by Vietnamese Embassy in Washington D.C. Covert American intervention began as early as 1954.