Holly Fairbank (choreographer/dancer) and John Toth (sculptor/digital artist) collaborate on a performance-installation piece we call a “BOOK” “The Nurses' Back; Apparitions on a Landscape” (working title) inspired by Salvador Dali.
Using fabric as pages of a life-size “book” to create places for video and photography projection and illuminations, Toth’s sets provide a space within which Fairbank has opportunity to interplay with her own image as well as classical images and familiar everyday objects to examine an interior mind-scape much as Salvador Dali alluded to in many of his surrealist paintings.
Within the context of “Dali Today: Dance and Beyond” the performance installation extends the artifacts from Dali’s archives into a live extension of his vision some 70 years later.
Fairbank and Toth are intrigued with ambiguous, distorted images of the body and the possibilities of amorphous images that emerge between the interplay of 2 dimensional virtual dream-like media images layered onto a 3 dimensions performance installation space. The performance unfolds like dream through subliminal layering of media onto the partial and disguised view of the dancers body. The dialogue between virtual images and iconic dance postures suggests an imagery that carves out new kinds of meaning that extend the modern narrative into the multi-dimensional space of a shared virtual dream
Picture Book
About 3 in the Morning, 4:16. performance May 5, 2010
Lincoln Center, Clark Studio
Holly Fairbank- choreography / dance
John Toth - intermedia / video installation
Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.
About 3 in the Morning, 4:16.
John Toth - video
Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.
8 Hours Later, 4:00.
performance May 5, 2010
Lincoln Center, Clark Studio Holly Fairbank- choreography / dance
John Toth - intermedia / video installation
John Cage, composer / music
Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.
8 Hours Later, (John Cage), video 720 x 396, 2010, 4:00. Holly Fairbank and John Toth
Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.
Holly Fairbank and John Toth
The Nurse's Back, (Book 7), video, 2010, 4:04
Mysterious Mouth Appearing in the Back of My Nurse, 1941
gouache on paper, - 44.7 x 30.3 cm,
Madrid, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Gift of Dalí to the Spanish State
Key ideas:
forced perspective lines
horizon line
clouds, sea and Mts..
still landscape sounds-birds. wind, whisper
diaphanous fabric,...
props...fish, knife, lobster, grapes, clocks, eggs, grasshoppers (he was horrified by them)
themes of female form...nurse, emblematic, Gala/Madonna, grotesque weight/placement
Dali Book Installation: 60" x 45" x 15" with three hinged panels. Mylar, PVC tubing, tricot fabric.
He places and weights bodies in space-they float but they have gravity to assert themselves - be muscular and push against surface - they are not ethereal -the body seems very vital in his cosmology - flesh and the things that sustain it.
Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.
Dali Motifs:
horizon lines
wooden crutch
windows,portals, frames
cabinet with drawers open
"dreamlike stillness"
fish
breasts
eggs
clocks
female torsos
peoples backs
rectangles
landscapes
teeth
mountains in background
blue and beige
pedestals
partial bodies
horses
double image
"the floating state
still motion (still life fast motion"
women's faces gazing sex. food, light
John Cage piece is The Perilous Night-played by Margaret Leng Tan and with some singing from Joan la Barbarahope