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Multidisciplinary Arts and Technology Artist Amanda Wallace: Make History Now

September 10, 2015 by Renee Marchol Leave a Comment

 

 

Reserved is a limiting label that is painful to unpeel. Shy is another description that can limit others’ expectations of an individual. Multidisciplinary Artist Amanda Wallace is a self-described minority and Woman in Tech colleague of Regina Larre Campuzano of the Spokane Washington fine arts and technology lab. Like Regina, Amanda is allowing audiences to experience in a sensory way what life is like through her eyes. For Regina, sound is primary. For Amanda, she chose to learn code in order to create overlays and spinning visuals to share her thoughts on race and history in the making.

 

Reserved and shy were some of the words written on adhesive labels and applied directly to Amanda’s skin. The artist chose to make literal, tangible and concrete what is abstract, distant and hard-to-imagine for others.

 

We use a jury process here at Laboratory to make sure we get a diversity of viewpoints in our selection process. With Amanda’s application, our jury was really excited about Amanda’s work dealing with her experience as an African-American in the modern world, and especially interested in bringing an artist living in a city with a large minority population to Spokane, where we have like, 3 black people (joking aside, only 3% of the population is African-American here). We were really motivated to bring her practice here to engage our community with racial issues in light of the ongoing national conversation around racial justice, and her timing couldn’t have been more perfect with the Rachel Dolezal situation occurring just before her visit. It was also really exciting for us, from a mentorship standpoint, to help Amanda transition her practice from primarily photography and video work into interactive art – the interactive art space has a lot of white dudes in it, and bringing some more voices to practice in the medium is going to be really important for the field’s development.–Alan Chatham

 

Alan Chatham and a jury of advisors at the Spokane Lab recognized Amanda Wallace’s art as especially timely so invited her to join the residency. Chatham explains that the demographic served by the lab is less than 3% minority and that it would be beneficial to the community for understanding in the climate of racial violence in national news.

 

Our Editor-in-Chief Renee Marchol became a Washington State resident a year ago and can verify that there is less diversity in let’s say Everett WA than SF CA not because Everett is racist and that San Francisco is morally superior but that’s the way geography and job opportunities have made it so. Just as Renee observed that Everett neighbors found her curious as a Chinese American woman doing a eco sport documentary, Spokane had yet to have the chance to meet more African American women with psychology degrees and conceptual art to share with coding.

 

For the piece “Unpeeling/Unpiling Amanda Wallace solicited others to contribute to the word bank used for labels. She was the only subject recorded. The solicitation of words from others is a form of interaction.

 

For “Field | House” completed by Amanda Wallace at the Spokane Laboratory, she was not the subject. Instead she used “found” imagery and footage for the visuals. “Field|House” has text originally written by Amanda Wallace but she was free from “subjecting” her visible body to the artwork. The piece is interactive depending on how long the viewer stands in front of the piece because the experience is at the command of the viewer like all art.

race history culture identity art Amanda Wallace

Photo Credit: Field |House by Amanda Wallace Spokane Laboratory

 

Another reason? Amanda Wallace describes artists as champions of contemplation. She teaches part-time but through her art she teaches full-time. When she teaches high school students and adults taking college courses she assists them in overcoming barriers for empathy for others. Like Artist Regina, Amanda guides viewers to recognize wrong assumptions and equips the audience to remove lenses that distort.

 

Example:

 

An image of a clothesline and a hanging hairpiece (a weave) with a black woman in the background

Hair Stories Untold Nakeya B race culture identity

Photo Credit: Nakeya B “Hair Stories Untold”

 

 

 

How do her students begin discussion? The first assumption is an extreme one: her students assume a negative assumption that the message is of self-hate and rejection of natural hair. For more, read “Hair Stories Untold“.

 

That isn’t always the case and that isn’t the end of the conversation. Like Regina Larre Campuzano, Amanda Wallace challenges the viewer to consider other possibilities that require empathy: as an individual what might this person be thinking. Group-lumping is also severely limiting. It halts thinking by ending exploration and the stamina for understanding another human. Maybe the individual enjoys variety and changes hair decoration like any other clothing accessory. This is a new future, one that does not dismiss another as alien and lacking the same breadth of wants and needs of human expression.

 

That’s not to say that hair isn’t a controversial topic. Our Editor-in-Chief Renee Marchol currently bleaches her natural black hair nearly platinum blonde to stir conversation about identity and individual freedom too. In Renee’s case just as her blonde female colleagues have championed for respect for Asians on the nearby UCLA campus, Renee dyes her hair yellow so she can field sexist blonde jokes that her allies are pummelled. As a Oh yeah? Say that to me if you dare to say that to my friend. Plus Renee likes variety and her fave aesthetics are from the mysterious deep ocean where creatures are eyeless, gelatinous or strikingly hued. Becoming eyeless or jellyfish-like is not on the menu yet for Renee but no promises.

 

Renee is Chinese American and the public often reminds her of that difference though her message is shared human experiences. So Renee shared with Amanda her complaint about “hijacking”: when corporations use emotional ads with a seemingly advocacy role to sell product.

 

Likewise Amanda also feels a sense of loss when major brands in mainstream markets take on natural hair care for African American customers. Why? Because its corporate giants rather than grassroots. It does not come from the authentic community.

 

Amanda Wallace would also be pleased if street teams would be willing to wear “future histories” t-shirts and walk as interactive art suggesting that the simple act of interacting with a stranger on the sidewalk where meetings between the majority and minority are unfamiliar we are changing the course of history for the better.

 

For more about Amanda’s current work including conceptual interactive art about the black body, colorism and the contrast of images of lynching with Bree Newsome’s famous climb up a flagpole to remove a Confederate Flag visit www.amandarwallace.com

“Spidey Sense” for Subterranean Documentaries: An Interview with Biologist Niall Doran

October 11, 2014 by Renee Marchol Leave a Comment

In horror movies, the plucking of string instruments usually signals the crawling of spiders onto someone with arachnophobia. In contrast, imagine a group of camera operators pursuing spiders into the dark for a documentary.

Niall Doran Documentary 16L

Photo Credit: Joe Shemesh Bookend trust Dr. Niall Doran

SGL (Media) met via Skype with Biologist Niall Doran of Tasmania last week. Dr. Doran is working with Bookend Trust and celebrity Neil Gaiman. Here Dr. Niall Doran answers  our readership questions about filmmaking, camera hacks for corrosive environments and adventure.

SmartyGirls and SmartyFellas are partnering with Niall Doran from now to Halloween to assist in raising $100,000 towards his awesome-face research.

What did the research require? 19 hours underground with little light and lots of damp and cold. Repeat for 30 days. Then repeat again for 90 days. Continue for 2 years.

Fun fact? 6 P.M. Pacific Standard Time (PST) in North America is before noon in Tasmania.

Why is SGL partnering with spider documentaries this season? To encourage art, science and filmmaking. As a thought-starter for those considering lifetime career  in science for the environment.

1. In what way can my blog and social media partners assist you with Sixteen legs? Do you hope for more likes? Donations?
We’re definitely happy with more likes/followers, either via Twitter (@BookendTrust) or our Facebook page , and we’re also after schools, teachers and students from around the globe to look at what we’re doing and to be a part of our general education programs – either online, or through touring of our exhibitions and other materials. But at its heart, this current campaign is really about fundraising. Bookend began with a small group of people putting their own money into this work because we believe it’s important to inspire the next generation. We’ve been running this work for a long time now, but this current project (Sixteen Legs) is a bit more than we can manage just on our own!

2. My audience includes filmmakers who are curious what types of gear was used for the shoots in the dark and in water. Tell me how you dealt with conditions. 
Given the challenges involved in getting the footage (spiders not liking light or heat, cameras not liking wet & corrosive conditions, and crew not liking extended periods in dangerous dark places) we decided to film at the best resolution available at the time, so that we wouldn’t have to go back to do it all again. The best available at the time was digital 5K with a Red Epic camera, which in turn put limitations on the rock crevices we could access and the focal distances we could work with. Depending on how much background your audience wants on the film-making challenges, here’s some extra info:

(i) A sneak peek at some excerpts from the behind-the-scenes doco, where our DOP discusses the choice of cameras.
(ii) And in much more detail, here’s a link to an article that was run in Australian Cinematographer on
the challenges of the filming

 

3. How long is your campaign: 6 weeks? We’d like to assist from now to October 31st.

That’s fantastic – any help getting a good response before the end of the month would be greatly appreciated. We’re planning to run the fundraiser to the end of November, although we will need to close off on some items before then so we can get the books printed and delivered before Christmas. That’s especially so for the Deluxe book option, in which people get the books signed by the contributors (including Neil Gaiman) and their name printed inside the book.

Other comments:

At its heart this a quirky, fun and slightly creepy story about giant prehistoric spiders seeking love in the dark. They grow to the size of a dinner-plate and they are still living in the caves of Tasmania. They have a legspan of 18cm (7 inches), and webs that can be six feet or more across. They live in some of Australia’s biggest and deepest caves, and they are of high scientific interest globally as their story spans at least 200 million years. They are survivors from the first age of the dinosaurs; they predate the splitting of the continents when Antarctica, South America and Australia separated (their closest relatives are in Chile and Argentina); they appeared at a crucial junction in global spider evolution; and they have endured throughout the entirety of human civilisation.

Everything about them breaks the usual spider rules: they have complicated and very kinky love lives, they build highly structured egg-sacs that are much more complicated than those of other spiders, the young take longer to merge than other spiders (9 months! instead of 6-8 weeks), and they live for decades (instead of 2-3 years). We’ve pieced together the spider’s life history through 23 years of scientific research, and we have just captured the key facets of all this via 2 years of documentary filming.

By sticking a camera crew underground for months at a time, we’ve finally captured their lifecycle on film, in glorious 5K resolution, and we’re working with best-selling international author Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Sandman, Doctor Who) on a documentary that not only presents the science, but has a ‘dark fairytale’ rendition of the science woven through it. This was recently showcased to an audience of global broadcasters in France as one of only 7 ‘in production’ natural history documentaries selected from around the globe. The main “Sixteen Legs” documentary won’t be finished until next year, but a shorter piece on what it took to film the spiders (“16 Legs: Spider Love”) has just been selected as a finalist at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in Canada, where it will screen in November. It will also be shown in a dual world premiere at the Breath of Fresh Air (BOFA) Film Festival in Australia on the same day (November 9 – both hemispheres on the same day).

We’ve also recently held an exhibition about the filming, complete with 18 foot (!) replicas of the spiders, and there’s a whole range of educational work we’ve been doing on this topic – see http://www.bookendtrust.com/caves for how the whole educational side fits together.

Why are we doing this? We run an education charity called the Bookend Trust, and the successful exposure of this documentary will both promote and support our work. The short version of our mission statement is to “inspire students with the careers they can build making the world a better place”. We started this work as a self-funded group of individuals with backgrounds in science (many of us biologists). Bookend was initially funded through my long service leave and equity on my house. We now draw income from a range of sources, including working as consultants, incoming grants and donations, business sponsorships, and the development of documentary content. The range of projects we run with students has grown dramatically, and although we are based in Tasmania we have participating schools across Australia and around the globe.

A video snapshot of Bookend’s work

Overview of all our projects

We’re not using a typical crowd-funding approach to this project, as the books and other rewards will be available irrespective of the funds raised. However, the fundraising target – if reached – will release an extra reward for one lucky contibutor, and that’s the trip to Tasmania. It’s an opportunity to get to a fantastic far away place with Neil Gaiman, at a time when the exchange rate is good and supporters from the northern hemisphere would be trading winter for summer. The winner will see fantastic behind-the-scenes work with endangered and unusual animals in Tasmania, as well as cultural experiences (such as the world-famous MONA Museum and associated Festivals) and the opportunity to be a part of the filming of Sixteen Legs.

Where to donate/buy fundraising rewards:

www.sixteenlegs.com

2014 Banff Mountain Film Festival Finalist – Sixteen Legs
2014 Official International Pitch Selection – Sunny Side of the Doc international market, France

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