Responses from Emily Pothast of Midday Veil and Director Steven Miller

On The Spiritual &
Conceptual Side of Things

Q&A by Thad McKraken

Your new video basically involves keyboardist David Golightly being buried alive by a coven of witches as a sacrifice to some creepy daemonic super witch entity so the rest of Midday Veil can rock out that much harder or something like that. Where did this concept come from, and how does David feel about all this high strangeness (and the inherent awesomeness of gold lamé underwear)?

EP: Haha! I guess you could say that the basic concept has been sort of developing for years, due to our interest in mythology, especially ancient mystery religions that involve sacrificing or dismembering a god/hero and taking him into the underworld in order to give him a secret awareness of the processes of death and resurrection.

The first spark of the idea for the video actually came to us last spring while David and I were hiking at Moran State Park on Orcas Island. There are some stone structures out there that were built by the WPA in the 1930s, and they really look like they should be used to have a rock show that culminates in a human sacrifice. Weird dungeon/picnic pavilion vibes. As the concept developed, it ended up making more sense to use Seattle locations, but we did spend the better part of a day brainstorming after stumbling onto those structures.

A few weeks later we were at brunch with a Seattle artist named Amanda Manitach (who appears in the video as one of the women in white slips, whom we called “maenads” during production). We started telling her about our idea, and the cake orgy just sort of emerged during the conversation. Some of Amanda’s work involves the eroticized use of messy food, and that was definitely an inspiration in the early stages. At least… a cake orgy at a rock show seemed like a logical project for us to work on together!

As far as the golden shorts go, David is an excellent sport. Also, he looks great in them, so there’s that.

SM: I heard Emily and Amanda’s idea for a cake sacrifice, then found out the song is over 11-minutes-long and knew that there had to be more involved in the story. At that first meeting, I had the idea to bring in a coven of witches to call in the dark goddess and instigate the maenads into action. As for the burying alive — a friend did an O.T.O. ritual years ago where she was symbolically buried and sequestered from all humans for a month before being reborn into the world. I really liked that idea but wanted to make it literal, since I knew it would be disturbing to see. I’d been wanting to create that visual ever since I asked Canadian band Les Jupes if they’d do it for a band photo years ago. They said no, but David didn’t mind at all! From there, I wrote a script that is basically the video as you see it.

I found the concept particularly fascinating, because one of the themes that has been interpenetrating my psychic life as of late has been that of female energy consuming and feeding off the masculine — as if the previous era of humanity has shifted and now it’s time for the sacred feminine to devour the dark war mongering energy that “mankind” has created. Terence Mckenna, Whitley Strieber, and others have described encountering entities that have an almost insectile-multi-eyed-telepathic-hive-mind characteristics. I don’t know if you’re up on insect sexuality, but the feminine typically reigns supreme in that micro-verse. There are no King Bees, if you catch my drift. Thoughts?

EP: Oh wow. Well, I mentioned the inspiration of mystery religions, myths that explore the inner workings of sex and death, which definitely relate to the core processes of nature. These myths are at the root of Christianity, but while the basic mechanism of the dying/resurrecting godman is alive and well in the character of Christ, the “feminine” and erotic aspects of the eternal that were also present in early versions of the myth have been considered taboo for most of Western history.

Elsewhere in the world, the Dark Devouring Mother is acknowledged in figures like Rangda or Kali, but in the west, the worship of the sacred feminine has been driven underground, where it has nevertheless persisted in the form of esoteric practice and witchcraft…

It’s interesting that you mention bees because there is such a close association between the symbolism of beehives, the Great Goddess, and witchcraft…

SM: I’ve encountered that insectile DMT universe, but I don’t think that was at play here. It wasn’t until I saw the video completed that I recognized what I was trying to invoke. A coven of witches create a ritual that stir the women at the concert to unleash their subconscious desires to consume David AND call forth the Great Cold of the Night simultaneously: the ritual invokes both the id and superego of feminine energy. David gets buried and consumed, then reborn anew as the dark goddess’ consort. For me, the story isn’t so much about creating a matriarchy as a balancing of the energies. They walk off together hand-in-hand at the end of the story to symbolize that balancing. I’m guessing this story says more about my own subconscious; since I was a child, hermaphroditic angels have always been the enlightened beings in my dreams.

The last time I saw you guys live, I was mildly tripping on mushrooms. Emily handed me a maraca at the beginning of the set, which was a very tribal improv freak out thing. I got so into shaking that maraca that I actually gave myself a huge blister without even realizing it. I was somehow so wrapped up in the music that I completely blocked out the mounting pain. You could say it was a mild form of possession. With that in mind, do you see a lot of potentiality in the live musical experience as a means to create new ideas regarding spirituality and therefore spiritual ritual? Also, do you ever sit up at night thinking about the potential consequences of handing maracas to tripping people?

EP: I definitely think there’s a link between music performance and spiritual ritual, and while these might seem like new ideas given our very secular culture, I think it’s essentially as old as humanity. There is this book from the ’80s called The Death and Resurrection Show that is all about the performative nature of “shamanism” and its impact on the emergence of the performing arts. It’s almost cliché, since so many mediocre musicians like to imagine themselves as “shamans,” but there’s a reason we want to identify rockstars with that archetype. There’s a deep history there.

I’m sorry my shaker gave you a blister!

What is the underlying theme and concept behind your new album The Current? Is it kind of like tapping into the psychic grid connecting us all and finding your path — what Christians refer to as the Holy Spirit or what Vivian refers to as Intuitive Navigation? Or am I completely off track with that?

EP: You know, the concept of this album is a little more open-ended than some of the things we’ve done in the past. The first song on the album is called “The Current”, and it was written as a jam in the studio that I had to go back and write words for, which isn’t exactly the easiest way for me to work.

There is an artist in Seattle named Sharon Arnold who curates these box sets of art multiples with a written component, called LxWxH. A couple of years ago, she asked me to write something for one of the boxes, and I contributed an essay called “The Current”. At the time, I was trying to find a way to weave together the works of two visual artists whose work was very different from one another. I liked the image of the current because it is evocative of both the literal currents of natural processes and also the common thread that emerges within an artist’s work over time, as older works are given a new context when they enter into dialogue with new works, or even the way that versions of “self” or identity can be conceived of as snapshots along an invisible axis that winds through time.

Currents have no content of their own, but they help create the form of everything. So yeah, your idea about the Holy Spirit is probably not far from the mark! Of the six songs on this album, two, “Choreia” and “Remember Child”, are new versions of songs that appeared on our very first CD-Rs together as a band. The identity of those songs has changed widely since we first conceived of them, and those songs have seen us through a lot of changes. New band members have joined, and a couple of members have left, but there is still a continuity within the music. There’s a continuity with our videos, too, although the latest one obviously, uh, takes the cake. We’re actually about to issue a super limited, tour-only VHS compilation of all the videos that Midday Veil has produced over the past few years. It’s 56-minutes long, which is a lot of video! There are common threads there, too, especially the exploration of video feedback, which uses the inherent properties of video to generate emergent forms that seem to illuminate a hidden world of the forces of nature.

Ω

Related posts:

1. Midday Veil – “Choreia” Music Video Premiere
2. Midday Veil – “Anthem” Music Video
3. Midday Veil – Moon Temple Music Video (Subterranean Ritual II)

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Midday Veil – Great Cold of the Night Music Video (w/ Director & Musician Interviews)

Honey And Lightening, 2011. Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle

Artists often describe their ideas as beginning with a seed, but with Greer the analogy is more literal: her work gives the impression of growth, and her compositions wind sinuously across both body and landscape as fractalized coral reefs that gracefully devour everything they come in contact with. Her painstaking craftsmanship involves the weaving and layering of such diverse materials as buttons, pom poms, sequins, beads, plastic trinkets, glitter, mirrors, and family members’ hair. She uses “cheap materials” in such absurdly detailed, utterly chaotic excess that they they take on an aura of luminous richness.

Her latest subjects involve strong, folkloric figures festooned in elaborate headdresses. They move gracefully through kaleidoscope forests and fields of trailing grass. One gets the sense of being enveloped by an epic fairy tale, but it’s one that lacks a definitive plot. Greer draws from a wide spectrum of folk tales, finding inspiration in stories from Greek, Roman and Chinese cultures. “I stumble upon mythology that speaks to the struggle,” she explains.

There is an inherent delicacy in textile work – one that Greer both embraces and contradicts. In her works, haunting vignettes of half-told stories are littered with crocheted entrails and vines of thick, cloying mud that evoke a sense of elegant foreboding. They deal with a sense of vague narrative that, through abstraction, finds archetype; her installations whisper of timelessness – of a buried, invisible power that runs below the surface of the world that we cavalierly inhabit.

At the time of our interview, Greer was still in the process of settling into her home studio, and walking into her workspace was like entering the magical dress up box every child dreams of having. Her studio is filled with giant, color-sorted plastic bins of fascinatingly patterned and textured scraps of fabric. Half of her studio is devoted to an exposed beamed staging ground for installations, and there are so many odds and ends lying around that, for someone with an attention span as short as mine, it’s difficult to find a place for the eye to rest.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW
Honey And Lightening, 2011. Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle

Greer and her husband, artist Paul Margolis, began working on a home studio space in response to the difficulty of procuring affordable, long-term workspace suitable for large scale installations. It took four years to procure all the necessary permits for the studio, and the process of its creation became part of the inspiration for The Cherry Root Chamber, one of the installations in Honey And Lightening. Much of Greer’s work is about unveiling and finding successive layers through exploration. In her artist statement for Honey And Lightening, Greer describes the process of revelation that accompanied digging the foundations for her studio. “The root chamber,” she writes, “is like entering this underground world hidden from view of long-ago electric ephemeral desires that have now turned into strong and sturdy roots – not as flashy as lightening, but quietly enduring and growing.”

Greer received her undergraduate degree from the Arts And Crafts program at the University of Georgia in Athens. “It sounds like a certificate you’d get from Jo-Ann [Fabrics And Crafts], right?” Greer jokes. She pursued her MFA at the University of Washington in the Ceramics department, and speaks highly of the creative freedom she found within the program.

“In some ways the UW art departments are very traditional,” she says. “Painting is oil on canvas, or there’s tension. There’s dogma.” But she cites the Ceramics department as an exception to the clearly delineated rules, and when counseling undergraduates, she always gave the advice to “be a Ceramics major then make whatever you want. You don’t have to use clay; they don’t care.”

Greer initially worked in ceramics because she was drawn to the tactility of the medium. “With clay,” she says, “there’s a whole association with functional objects that you have this really intimate relationship with, like cups that touch your mouth. I hate the whole sterility of display.” She arranged her ceramics “to seem like the private space of somebody,” and this sense of voyeuristic intimacy has remained a strong theme in her work.

Eventually, she realized that although she was working in clay, she was creating in such a way that she was circumnavigating her own medium. “I was making clay forms,” she explains, “and pouring latex over them, and then removing the latex and sewing it together.” Gradually, Greer phased out clay as a support structure, and began to work more directly with fibers.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW
Honey And Lightening, 2011. Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle

At the beginning of her career, Greer had hoped to follow the traditional trajectory of being discovered right out of grad school and instantly picked up by an established gallery. That aspiration informed her work, and she initially “wanted to make stuff that people would want to take home” in order to make a living. Shaped by her pragmatism, Greer’s earlier works were small in scale and gave nods towards accessibility, but once she “failed to be discovered,” she found new freedom.

“I abandoned [that goal] and that’s when my work got really big and unwieldy, and I couldn’t fit into that mold,” she says. Ultimately, she is very grateful for not following the path she initially envisioned for herself. “It’s so much better to have a little bit more of a struggle and not get stuck in that system.”

While Greer’s career didn’t progress as she had initially anticipated, she has achieved great success. Her big break came when she won a commission for a permanent installation at the Seattle Central Library, and she has since become a visible and active presence both in the Northwest and on a national level. Locally, she has received grants from the Washington Artist Trust, 4Culture, and The Office Of Arts & Cultural Affairs; she has worked extensively with experimental dance and music performers Degenerate Art Ensemble and has been featured on the cover of Fiberarts magazine. Like many of the artists I speak with, Greer seems a bit shy in discussing her successes, and emphasizes that it took a lot of hard work to end up where she is.

Greer’s studio is a somewhat hectic environment, and our conversation is punctuated by the comings and goings of her herd of small dogs (“One of them isn’t mine,” she makes sure to tell me. “We’re just watching him for a friend.”), and her six-year-old son, Hazel. Hazel tries admirably to give us grown-up time, but he can’t stop himself from intermittently charging into the studio to give me impromptu astronomy lessons. Greer rolls her eyes affectionately at the interruptions, and laughingly acknowledges that the decision to homeschool Hazel has certainly made it difficult to find long stretches of time to work. “He would just wither in a traditional school,” she tells me, and explains that he has grown up amidst the chaos of her creative process and is very much a part of it. Hazel informs me, with the grave enthusiasm that only a six-year-old can possess, about the mineral composition of Jupiter and the number of volcanoes on Io, his favorite moon. Listening to Hazel’s celestial factoids, I am struck by the similarities between mother and son, by their shared fascination with the grandiose, invisible underpinnings that inform our experiences of the visible world.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW
Mater Matrix Mother and Medium, 2009. Discovery Park, SeattleSower And Slug Princess (for The Silvering Path), 2008

During the course of our conversation, Greer and I end up embarking on a long tangent about feminism. Being a female fiber artist necessitates the discussion of gender roles, and Greer has spent a great deal of time mulling over the relationship between her gender and the traditionally feminine associations of her medium.

“The nature of my work means that I get co-opted into a lot of conversations about feminism,” she tells me in the firm voice of someone who has learned to be strongly opinionated without coming across as aggressive. In describing her technique, Greer explains that she sews and crochets “like a bachelor,” and that she deliberately maintains a rough-hewn technique in a refusal to be pigeonholed by the handcrafted element of her work. There is a ferocity to Greer’s construction that stubbornly demands the acknowledgement of the masculine element of handwork.

“It’s interesting when men sew,” Greer tells me. “It’s not anything new. [My husband] Paul, as a man who sews, has a personal research project, and has always been drawn to learning about historical evidence of men sewing. In the Civil War, [in] convalescent homes for injured soldiers – they made quilts. Sailors have always been big sewers, knitters, crocheters, knotters… Handwork is not something that needs to be inherently feminine, and I like that idea.”

Greer often finds herself frustrated by what she sees as the “dude art” scene of the Northwest –- hot shot young male artists who achieve rapid success by “messing around with building materials”– and she wishes that there could be a more egalitarian discussion of implicitly gender-charged mediums. She tells me of a female friend who paints flowers, and how there would be a “different level of impact” if the same work were to be created by a male artist.

She pauses, trying to find the right words to express the subtle distinctions between the feminist connotations of her medium, and her own personal relationship to feminism. “The tactile quality of what I’m after,” she explains deliberately. “It’s about what it is to have a body, to have skin. But I am a woman in the 21st century, and it’s inescapable to talk about my own feminism.” For Greer, she sees her feminism as being expressed through the themes and archetypes that she chooses to explore, and has been frustrated in the past by what she sees as the art world’s insistence that her art is feminist simply because it’s handwork.

Greer is currently working on Biologica Symbolica, a permanent installation for Seattle’s Bow Lake Elementary School that will explore the concept of the four elements. Throughout Summer 2011, she will also be doing an open studio residency at a new multidisciplinary art space called The Project Room, for which she will interview weekly guest artists, host a series of community crocheting events, and maintain a process blog of her work.

Everything will be in preparation for a upcoming residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Greer plans to create work based around the A.S. Byatt short story, A Stone Woman. She quickly tells me the plot, explaining that the story is about a woman who, in her grief, gradually dissolves into her surrounding landscape. And it is there that our conversation ends, with a quote from Greer that elegantly sums up her own work.

“It’s a haunting story,” she says. “It’s at once terrifying and beautiful.”

mandygreer.wordpress.com

The Silvering Path, 2008. A film by Ian Lucero, in collaboration with Mandy Greer and Haruko Nishimura.

Related posts:

1. Honey And Lightening: Installations & Works By Mandy Greer
2. Free Sheep Foundation Has October On Lockdown
3. Jeremy Mangan Artist Interview: The Magic Revival Of Rural Landscapes

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Mandy Greer Artist Interview : Timeless Textile Landscapes

We wrote about the Free Sheep Foundation months ago, but their music and art combining antics just keep getting more frequent, more relevant, and more unpredictable.

Here’s what their upcoming October calendar looks like… just to give you a wee little taste of what is to come (not to mention the October 1 and 2 events that have already passed).

OCT 3 – GUTTER DANDY GALA, 9PM – 2AM, $5-$10 SUGGESTED
(Girl punk bands and window installations!)
MUSIC: Orkestar Zirconium, Hot Grits!, Scratchmaster Joe, motrecraft
ART INSTALLATIONS: Garek Druss, Static Invasion, scntfc, NKO, No Touching Ground, dk pan, Karn Junkinsmith, Wen Marcoux

OCT 10 – GALLERY OPENING, FT. FORT
(Video projections, new window installations, and a blanket/chair/sofa fort!!!)
ART INSTALLATIONS: Gretchen Bennet, Laura Corsiglia, Sirkullay, Mark Johnson
VIDEO: Mike Min

OCT 10 & 11 – SILVERING PATH
(3 dance/visual/art collabos, featuring… way too much stuff…)
MUSIC: Jeffrey Huston, Joshua Kohl
DANCE: Haruko Nishimura (Degenerate Art Ensemble)
ART/SCULPTURE: Mandy Greer, Colin Ernst
FILM: Ian Lucero
DRESS: Anna Lange

Just one amazing crochet sculpture piece by Mandy Greer!

* BRAIN EXPLOSION *
Be there or be square. These are some exciting times in the Seattle arts scenes.

Related posts:

1. Free Sheep Foundation Fixes Up TUBS.
2. Free Sheep Foundation Breathes Life Into Belltown
3. Mandy Greer Artist Interview : Timeless Textile Landscapes

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Free Sheep Foundation Has October On Lockdown