The geologic calibration of the family: a show at NEPO House, Dec. 22nd, 6-10pm

I am really finding some peace in bringing some of our works in Iceland to a close ( or sort of…I never seem to be done with anything completely).  One strong aspect of Solstenen project was to use my family culture as medium, like it was a one of the materials I had to choose from.  I’ve wanted to do a Little Treats show at NEPO House for quite awhile, and presenting some of the work about family archetypes, embracing and rebelling against them, seemed so appropriate for Klara Glosova’s project.  NEPO House and Little Treats in particular is about finding new options for sharing and experiencing art, more approachable, less hierarchal, as “a series of exhibitions, performances and screenings at NEPO House. Our goal is to provide a platform for local artists to show new work and an opportunity for the audience to experience artwork in an intimate setting of a home. Ultimately Little Treats is about hospitality, our encounters with art and with each other. In order to avoid moving too much furniture the shows take place only and entirely in our entry room.”

Pleas join us in December 22nd, 2012, from 6-10 pm. We’ll be making Icelandic heart-shaped waffles, Norwegian creme pudding and glogg and eggnog!  My favorite day to celebrate is the winter solstice and this opens the day after, so please come share some light with us!

“We Live Our Patient Day’s Allotted Span”

A multi-media exhibition by Mandy Greer, Paul Margolis and Hazel Margolis

NEPO HOUSE

1723 S Lander Street
Seattle, WA 98144

www.nepohouse.org

 

Opens Dec. 22^nd,   6-10pm

Conflating the private and public — traveling to places unknown, but working as a unit — the Mandy Greer-Paul Margolis clan of multi-generational artists set out to engage with the natural environment of Iceland in an intimate and hermetic approach.  Through fiber and film, play-acting, intuitive performance, obsessive accumulation of found natural and man-made artifacts, many of the artistic results explore and tear open the archetypes that each family member inhabits.

Through play and repetition, the roles each member played became refracted, as each sometimes embraced, sometimes rejected what seemed inexorably inevitable.    The family culture became medium, and that microcosm was expressed in the macrocosm of the geologic, a move that transcends the heartbreak of the day-to-day.

In this way, the emotional force of the child became the slow but constant pressure of a glacier, both a monumentally creative and destructive force.  The maternal instinct both emerges and retreats from isolation, like squeezing water from a stone and appositionally, an endless gorgeous torrent of a glacial swollen river.  The distant but shelter-building father figure moves earth and fire in an autonomic process of both steadfast strength and hapless misadventure.

Greer writes, “By locating our bodies at the center of this work about familial bonds, we are attempting to confront, repair and heal rifts in our lives that have both made our artistic life together possible and also strained it to near-breaking.  In breathtaking geographic isolation, an honesty emerges about the possibilities and failures of blending our roles as artists, parents and partners.

This presentation of photographs, installation sculpture, video, and performance artifacts is but one outcome of Mandy Greer’s ‘Solstenen Project’, a series of residencies over the course of a year exploring themes of weight and physical burden as external symbols of internal self-transformation — identity metamorphosing into the environmental — including 5 weeks in Iceland in the fall of 2012.

‘Solstenen Project’ residencies were sponsored in part by grants from 4 Culture, Artist Trust and the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs.

As part of NEPO “Little Treats” series, Mandy and Paul will be cooking Icelandic heart-shaped waffles and Norwegian Rommegrot (cream pudding), and maybe some glogg!