Monday, June 29, 2009

Jane Wang & Karen Aqua - installations

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photo: Bob Raymond (MAG)

Karen Aqua/Jane Wang

"Meditation on The Politics of Shoes
" mixed media

shoes and death
shoe bombs

cancer cells radiation skulls
animation/cartoons cute fuzzy animals?
vicious animals?

violence in Sunday morning cartoons?


shoes flung over telephone wires...

is it about ennui in youth

is it about something as innocuous as getting a new pair of shoes?

is it a neon sign saying“drugs here”?
is it about gangs and territory?

is it about someone died here/a child's sneakers?
could you fry if you touched a live telephone wire?


white for bones, red for bodies which have been skinned alive










photos: Bob Raymond (MAG)

Jane Wang
"Giant Red Ruby Shoe"
electrical wire installation (outside on patio)

"Keep tight inside of them -- their magic must be very powerful, or she wouldn't want them so badly!"
- from the Wizard of Oz film with Judy Garland

Lermontov: When we first met ... you asked me a question to which I gave a stupid answer, you asked me whether I wanted to live and I said "Yes". Actually, Miss Page, I want more, much more. I want to create, to make something big out of something little – to make a great dancer out of you. But first, I must ask you the same question, what do you want from life? To live?

Vicky: To dance.
- from the Michael Powell film “The Red Shoes”

“Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton! Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance—!”
- from Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale “The Red Shoes”

"Something about the power of ruby/red footwear – either to empower or overpower the wearer. It's strange that both although the ruby slippers and the red shoes ostensibly represented these two very different kinds of power, the end result was similar - for wasn't Dorothy flung back (even though through her own will) from a dreamland in lurid color to an arid, Grapes of Wrath type existence in black and white – a kind of living death? And in both cases, one could only remove the red shoes/ruby slippers by dying.

Isn't that kind of weird that so many children's stories turn out to be about death?"



Jane Wang is a member of the Mobius Artists Group. Although she primarily composes music for dance, theater and performance art theater-based work, her principal instruments being double bass, piano and toy pianos, she has recently returned to her on-going love of sculpture and 3-dimensional structures. Inspired in part by the touring exhibition, Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting, and the performance artist Hanne Tierney who she frequently collaborates with, she started working in the medium of wire to create large sculptures.

http://www.myspace.com/janewangcomposer


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