Original concept

In 2011, I began to create Ghost lines, exploring the body as a conduit for transformation.  Inspired by ghost towns, silent era clown films, and Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio, the masked characters in Ghost lines conjure remnants from a lost world, as if rising from the dust storms of the Great Depression.  I was interested in the metaphoric idea of a ghost town as a parallel to our failing cultural economy:  a completely abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, or war.  In 2007 my father died in the high deserts of Apple Valley, California and I began to wonder about my family connection to a ghost town in Nevada called Olinghouse.  I was immediately moved by images, stories, fantasies and feelings of this imaginary space.  I found this posting from someone visiting Olinghouse “Even in 1970 there was nothing much left of the [Olinghouse] town other than the remains of fallen down buildings and what appears to be the skeleton of an old wagon.”  This past year, I’ve been creating a freestyle movement language where I conjure a series of imagined spaces, forms, and languages in a continuous line drawing.  The Ghost line was a way to remember, imagine, and invent – and transform these spaces of decay and loss.

Photo taken by my Aunt Rose Tyson in her recent trip to the Olinghouse ghost town

In August, at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard, I developed a duet version with shadowshaper, Eva Schmidt. My interest has been to create a sustainable art practice where Ghost lines can be reconstituted in a variety of ways – through film, live art happenings, live performance, as photos, drawings, and an ongoing freestyle solo practice.  We are currently creating a shadowshaper series to appear through New York City, in a series of free and unannounced live art happenings – keep your eyes out for us if you’d like some clues on how to catch a sneek peek!

Photo by Andy Jordan, Ghost lines in Prospect Park

Ghost lines was first performed at The Yard, a contemporary artist residency, dance and performance center, as part of the Bessie Schonberg Choreographers’ and Dancers’ Residency on September 3, 2011.  

Film collaboration

Shona Masarin and I met this past fall while working on a film restoration project for Elaine Summers film of Trisha Brown’s 1971 Walking on the Wall at The Whitney.  I have been working in the archives for the Trisha Brown Dance Company since 2009 and Shona as Elaine Summers film assistant since 2011.  Cataloguing video since 2002 and not being able to touch, see or come in contact to the material inside the cassette jacket, I was amazed to experience a tactile and sensory connection to 8mm and 16mm film.  The physical and ephemeral nature of film connects to my ongoing interest in vaudeville, silent clown, and eccentric dance – forms that are fading in our contemporary art culture today. 

Shona brings a wide-range of techniques into play, including hand painting and tinting film, hand-processing, bleach experiments, frame-by-frame animation, collage and drawing, and contact printing on home-made emulsion.  Her work is often the result of in-process discovery as she intuitively explores the possibilities of the medium.  This process is related to that of the surrealists with their automatic poetry and exquisite corpses. Her exploration is largely tactile and haptic, oriented by touch.  

With Shona, we began to see the possibility to forge a new visual language, re-imagining the aesthetics from Vaudeville and early Dada and Surrealist films through experimental film techniques and tactics.  In the film, we see images moving between materialist/formal abstractions and dreamlike narrative forms. We are not interested in following a linear narrative. Instead, we are interested in using the bits and pieces of a narrative as triggers to explore memory, history, dreams, myth, and the collective unconscious.  In ghosting these languages that are seen as historical, archival, and antiquated, there is a possibility to forge a new seeing of the ephemeral.

Stay tuned as our Ghost line film unfolds!  We urge you to check out our Kickstarter page to find out more our project!  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/139958170/ghost-line

Shadowshaper, Eva Schmidt creeping along the wall

Filmed by Lauren Simkin Berke 

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Oscar Schlemmer’s amazing shape characters! 

Shadowshaper, Eva Schmidt 

Ghost lines was performed at The Yard, a contemporary artist residency, dance and performance center, as part of the Bessie Schonberg Choreographers’ and Dancers’ Residency on September 3, 2011.  

Ghost lines was performed at The Yard, a contemporary artist residency, dance and performance center, as part of the Bessie Schonberg Choreographers’ and Dancers’ Residency on September 3, 2011.  

Ghost lines process - filmed by Lauren Simkin Berke with Shadowshaper Eva Schmidt

In August 2011 at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard, I developed a solo where Eva emerges from a bag, as if from the void, to cypher out various vaudevillian line drawings.  In the line drawings, we play with the meanings of the verb “to draw”.  

Sense 1: pull, draw, force move, displace Sense 24: pull, draw move, displace Sense 2: reap, draw derive, gain Sense 10: draw arouse, elicit, enkindle, kindle, evoke, fire, raise, provoke Sense 3: trace, draw, line, describe, delineate mark Sense 6: draw represent, interpret Sense 19: draw create Sense 5: draw, pull, pull out, get out, take out remove, take, take away, withdraw Sense 7: draw, take out remove, take, take away, withdraw Sense 13: withdraw, draw, take out, draw off remove, take, take away, withdraw Sense 21: draw be Sense 17: draw remove, take, take away, withdraw Sense 36: draw localize, localise Sense 27: string, thread, draw arrange, set up Sense 29: guide, run, draw, pass Sense 32: draw thin Sense 33: draw steep, infuse Sense 35: draw shape, form Sense 4: draw, make create by mental act, create mentally Sense 8: describe, depict, draw set forth, expound, exposit Sense 9: draw choose, take, select, pick out Sense 11: puff, drag, draw inhale, inspire, breathe in Sense 12: draw travel, go, move, locomote Sense 14: draw, cast move, go Sense 15: draw, get effect, effectuate, set up Sense 16: draw change, alter, modify Sense 18: draw write, compose, pen, indite Sense 20: draw close, shut Sense 22: draw necessitate, ask, postulate, need, require, take, involve, call for, demand Sense 23: draw, quarter, draw and quarter kill Sense 25: absorb, suck, imbibe, soak up, sop up, suck up, draw, take in, take up Sense 26: attract, pull, pull in, draw, draw in pull, draw, force Sense 28: pull back, draw stretch Sense 30: tie, draw equal, match, equalize, equalise, equate Sense 31: draw change shape, change form, deform Sense 34: disembowel, eviscerate, draw remove, take, take away, withdraw 

Shadowshaper, Eva Schmidt creeping along the wall

Filmed by Lauren Simkin Berke