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BOXES beyond borders

Category: Interactive

A Falcon or a Great Song

Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.

LEASA MAYERS, PRESIDENT, CRG EVENTS

In talking to Leasa Mayers about her life – her family, and her work promoting others in their ventures, the powerful Rainer Maria Rilke poem, “Growing Orbits” came to mind. It inspired me to transform the plain wooden box into a cradle holding a bird’s nest with eggs to honor Leasa’s endeavors; her creative spirit, her effective nurturing which helps others to take flight.

 

Did you want to Come In?

This piece explores the dialogic relationship in question and response.  The speaker of the question, did you want to come in? –which is computer printed text repeated- this speaker is absent in image but present because of the text.  The viewer is alone with the question and asked to respond but in a monologic way.  The dichotomy between one way communicating and communication, an interactive experience, is brought out in the piece through its own dichotomy – the answer is not provided for the viewer.

 

Ear Sees, Eye Hears

This box, created by Magdalena Pederin, is actually the second box to bear its name. The original box was an interactive work that reacted to voices and other sounds around it with green and red LED diodes. The original box was unfortunately stolen, but when asked about her opinion on the situation Magdalena responded calmly. She said that the individual who took the work considered it a good one. She then suggested creating a new version of the box out of plexiglass, which became the box featured here.

Project Recipe Box

This is a collaborative effort by mail/email, having started in December 2000 and will conclude December 2002. It asks participants to contribute a recipe from their mothers. The word recipe is open to interpretations: memories/ remedies/ conversations that occur in the kitchen/ contents of a pre-packed lunch/ etc. This is a simple project, based on a chain of words – women/ mothers/ cooking/ kitchen – used within a simplistic context of a stereotype, there are many distinct and different identities. In a kitchen, each woman develops multiple and complex ways to deal with the role of mother cooking. This role (one associated with sugar-coated sentiments) is also the same role that allows a woman (who may have been defaulted into the kitchen) some measures of control over her family. The kitchen can be a very powerful or oppressive place depending on the woman occupying it. I would like to think that every mother occupied it differently. I hope that this project (a small and incomplete record of their many facets) may serve as a humble but deserving tribute to all our mothers. And if it fails to do that, it is at least, a collection of recipes to some very delicious and precious dishes.

The Women's Voices: Ye Shu Fang from WOMEN BEYOND BORDERS on Vimeo.

Spill It, A Veil of Truth

Coca-Cola Box Project.

The idea for our box originated from a website that the Coca-Cola company published called Spill It. Contained within the site were thousands of messages by people all around the world who just wanted to spill their minds and share with others. The box, covered with small pieces of aluminum Coca-Cola cans found in trash cans around the campus, is overflowing with little scrolls of personalized messages from whoever wanted to contribute.

Tentacles

Different lengths of ultra thin fishing wires with little wax-ends springing out from a pot of wax and resin, invite views to touch, shift, bend, change direction or distort. This work exemplifies the notion of interference, and seeks to actively engage the viewers to participate with the artwork to draw their own unique experiences from it. This activity will allow the development of patterns of collective creativity that does not merely privilege any one person’s experience.

Dreams Fly

Inside this box, within a bird, a dream is sealed.

Please PICK-UP and hold this wise, matriarchal creature. Shake her gently and listen. Hear her dream stir? What is within her; within you? Permit your vision to awaken emboldened, released with wings spread and soar beyond every limitation that you impress upon yourself.

Goethe said, “Whatever you do, or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Truly, all women have dreams and passions pleading to be set free on the wings of imaginary flight.

Another Play-Thing

A child or an adult who handles this magnetized material discovers through a variety of experience what it is saying.

For those who like surprises, I suggest collaboration with this animated material when attempting a re-arrangement – even “letting go” and allowing the magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion direct the play.

A haphazard appearance is one of the factors which may provoke a viewer, out of attraction, annoyance or curiosity, to touch this material and discover that its arrangement is temporary.

Arrivederci Roma

In a world of many and endless wars, this music box of memories represents moments of happiness from the past that offer us hope for a better future.

Invitation reverberates within the box’s walls. Notes hang from the ceiling, filling the shallow emptiness, filling us with the joy of a new moment, a new life, a sharing, a memory.