Maple Street Dance Space is honored to be a part of this three city, answer to Covid-19-through-the-Arts, initiative:
(From the Windows on the Future web site: )
“Windows on the Future is a regional series of storefront art installations that will run throughout the month of July across Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos, New Mexico. The collaborative effort supports working artists with stipend payments and brings vibrancy and vitality to central and northern New Mexico’s commercial districts while still encouraging social distancing.
In early May, the partnering organizations held an open call to artists, creatives, and art groups from within New Mexico to submit proposals for window showcase installations based on the theme “Windows on the Future.” Following a jury process to review the 200 submissions, 60 artists were selected – 20 installations per city. The selected installations take on a variety of topics and styles in their imaginings of the future, from environmental to social interactions, from realistic to fantastical scenes.”
"Distortion in Scale" in the front windows of Maple Street Dance SpaceBy Tara Booth and Charlotte Thurman. Audio composed by Dylan Blanchard.
Description of the Piece: “Distortion in Scale” investigates the undeniably alien quality of our own physical bodies, as well as the beautiful and strange occurrence that we each have a body. Touch is a form of power—on a spectrum with pleasure on one end and an extreme violation on the other—including their telescoping interdependence with one another. The piece’s rules of display demarcate an untouchable space of intimate interiority, physically removing the viewer’s ability to interact with the art objects outside of the mind’s eye.
The slow obliteration of our physical realities into that of a digital space threatens our inviolable rights to our own bodily experiences within the world. The current effects of the global pandemic as well as blatant systemic violence towards vulnerable communities further contextualizes a future need for the bodily awareness of ourselves and that of others. We cannot afford for our most valuable commonality to remain a liability for only some and a sanctified space for others.
We envision a future in which humans can reclaim the most intimate of their interior and exterior experience, that of their bodies. We embrace the unrecognizable, the grotesque, the complicated, the squishy, the delicate. In our future, the body is not treated as an ungainly artifact, but a locus of unexplored terrain. We’ve put the archaic maps and charts in a drawer. Or rather, we dust off the old map and fold it into a fan. We find new ways to appreciate and value our world and each other.
Bios & Links:
Bio for Charlotte Thurman:
Charlotte Thurman is an interdisciplinary Artist, whose practice bridges multi-media and immersive installation. Using ephemeral and time-based processes, the artist wades through fragmentary personal histories to transcribe what is familiar and what is forgotten along the arrow of time. The work takes an anthropological approach to a shifting and fluctuating landscape, inspired by her psychosomatic experiences of lucid dreaming and dream recording. Charlotte received her BFA in Mixed Media from the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2009, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Delaware in 2016. The Artist is the Co-Author/Co-Curator of the feminist-focused art zine “Life Raft” with Tara Booth. Charlotte currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico and works as an Artist at Meow Wolf.
Bio for Tara Booth:
Tara Booth is a multidimensional Artist that lives and works in Kansas City, MO. Rooted in ceramics, her work consumes the space where feminism, food, and the body meet. Booth's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries such as AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Kunstraum Tapir in Berlin, Germany, and Kaleid Gallery in San Jose, CA. Booth serves as an Assistant Professor of Art of Cottey College.
