Andy Mazorol — Boogie Woogie
HAIR and NAILS
Minneapolis Nov 17- Dec 22, 2016

Trimmings of dunce hats and hanging pig head turn Hair and Nails Gallery into a butcher shop. Cool 70’s and Stencil fonts on its facade modulate spooks and seductions. And what do the neighbors, vegan nut butter makers, make of this? Blood par, through those letters be handlers, piggly wiggly.

I’ll Be Your Mirror, the first painting, the first feeling .:. analog, be flat, translucent blood varnished. Plane forward and wait all night for Rap to quiet down to moon tan. Man, butt-naked(?), red sweatered, lean toward bikini girl with a conversational cigarette. She holds or focuses the beams’ reveal. Mickey Mouse music plays the shadows of chasing hoops. Context -co-op.

Dear music,
Photographs fold I remember. Zoetrope polka-dot brain contour stripe horses swoosh round the Depression peppertent, black, white, red, yellow, aqua and are sucked up. Photos become tattoos and walk. The past lives and these solid non- musics .:. paintings walk into folded albums. My grandfather had a patented triple beat Boogie –hyperplane out .:.

In Andy Mazarol’s Disneyland snakes are a presentation of freedom to handle, lounge and roll. The struggle is pixelated between eyes, but looksout analog. The person of the year knows this. Up, up, and away with our beautiful Buffoon.

On another beach two young women share a look and coke, victor, Victorian innocent. Jazzed asteroid-rise Black Parasol, night for day, a star globe of modest gossip. Their blanket-pool a well in the sand. This muted silent movie palette gets us to Mecca from Coney Island and Venice. It is calm between planes, fecund, stay stereo.

The sun is black, the sky sea, the ground always beachy; Mr. Mazarol Mr. Moonilight. Engulfed star face Boogie Woogies Cthulhu apron to hold kaleidoscope steadily. No rush poison, vision, all rush stars grip face, hands snakes.

Dialate atomized atoms. Lincoln’s pine-cone beard drops in Man With Serpent #(’s) 1 + 2. Day op of Night Sky Polka-dot Mask rises above a parent poli-patrician flipping flesh. Curlicue pigtail snakes wrote this at night, mock rampage, WITH HAIR, no, real Rasta, astral.

A base tone of localization haunts and redirects these works. The inner voyage of Orphans of the Storm. Thee Home Movie narrated by almost speaking violin, almost comforting, mostly dreaming, prying up the planes. Keeping blood-image at bay ‘til nick of time. Sweet and choral: a child’s yearnings. Are there pigs in the National Park or only in- must- the butcher shop -remember? Yes. Pink polka dots effervesce on a green hand above the door, dialing luck, the opposite of flesh color pastoralizes, building a soundproof wall. We are in.

by Sean Smuda

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HAIRandNAILS had its minds blown by Laurie Van Wieren’s dance performance “Temporary Action Theory” at The Southern Theater in November. To celebrate and extend the bliss, we hosted an artist talk with Laurie and her collaborators at the gallery and, here, asked Lighting Designer Heidi Eckwall about her work on the show.

H+N: I thought this was amazing choreography and performance, with Laurie’s presence really filling the space. It would seem that a solitary dancer could get lost in such a cavernous setting. How did you approach this problem from the perspective of lighting designer?

Heidi Eckwall: One of the questions I always ask when designing lights is how to frame the performance in concert with what the choreographer or director intends. What is the space the performer inhabits? How does the audience see the performer in the space? How visible, how shaped, how connected is the performer to the environment?

So it started with a conversation. Laurie was interested in having the lights move with her to open the space from upstage to downstage. I was interested in Laurie being the instigator of light, the one who was in charge of the light as much as possible. I thought it was important that Laurie control the opening look, that she be the one to start the performance, that it not be the usual “house to half, house out, lights up” that signaled the beginning.

Her first action was to plug in a light that was focused on the upstage brick wall.

When she plugged in that light, all of the other lights in the theater faded

out. Laurie walked in the beam of light to where it intersected the wall and she stayed there facing the wall, touching the bricks for a long time. What the audience saw was a figure splayed against a crumbling brick wall in a single beam of light. The audience doesn’t know what is going to happen–their presumed role is just to watch or witness and their focus is pretty contained by what is

visible. But then Laurie suddenly turned her head downstage, toward the audience, and the interaction between performer and audience became reciprocal. She sees them as they see her. They become part of the performance, part of the equation. I think this moment was important.

As Laurie travelled downstage, I added light but tried to give the illusion that her discovery of the proscenium arch, of the grid, of the side booms, of the seating area, of the voms, was what was motivating the lights to come on. As she climbed around and interacted with the walls, the pipes, the lighting instruments, she discovered the structure of the theater and found the visual art that was hidden, embedded, or placed there. She could not be lost in that cavernous setting because she and the audience were discovering it together. The Southern is a very familiar dance venue to most of the audience–I think they were able to see the room with fresh eyes and be surprised by some of the spaces it contains.

A solitary figure can be lost if they are separate or apart from their environment. If they are a part of the environment, how we see them becomes a question of scale and how they are integrated in the space. Laurie was the instigator of light and to a certain extent shaped what was visible by her focus and attention. The audience was connected and engaged, they saw the things that she saw, and participated in her discovery of the space. She wasn’t solitary at all–there were hundreds of people with her.