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Meet the Summer Artmonks

Meet the Summer Artmonks

The 2017 Art Monastic Laboratory

is a 10-week immersive experience in social sculpture.

This Lab investigates Practice —

meditation, high-level artmaking, and community living.

This summer’s Lab will incubate two artistic endeavors:

Mirror and Bootstraps.

Mirror

Gerry McCulloch and Betsy McCall are the co-creators of Mirror, an interactive, experimental art piece. Participants are guided to hold eye contact with a stranger for two minutes or more. Betsy intuitively guides them through a series of well-wishes. Meanwhile Gerry is filming them through a contraption that allows us to insert a cinema-quality camera within the axis of the eye contact. So the participants feel like they are simply looking at each other, but one of them is looking directly into the camera. This affords us a unique result: super high-resolution slow-motion footage that could capture the most human of experiences. Between Gerry’s outstanding technical experience (Gerry is Head of Cinematography, Film Editing and Sound Design of the MA in Filmmaking at Goldsmiths, University of London, currently operates Darshana Photo Art, and was previously Director of Untold Productions and film editor at the BBC.

Darshana Photo Art

Gerry McCulloch, returning Summer Artmonk, is an award-winning cinematographer, photographer and visual artist with broadcast and exhibition credits in film drama, documentary, television advertising commercials and promotional music videos.

 

 

Darshana Photo Art

Betsy McCall, Co-Founder and Abbess of the Art Monastery, is pretty much out-of-her-mind excited to be working with the likes of Gerry on their collaboration, Mirror. Betsy gets to really shine and focus on the social sculpture aspect of Mirror: the experience of the participants as they are filmed holding eye contact with strangers.

 

 

 

Bootstraps

The working title of the theater piece is “Bootstraps.” As a part of white, American folklore there is this phrase about (and sometimes admiration for) someone who can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and create a better life for themselves.” We will be looking at how this type of cultural mythology perpetuates harmful systems of privilege and capitalism. We will also be asking questions about how values like this can accelerate the fragmentation of our communities. The process will include an examination of how we define “success,” and an exploration into the underbelly of “rugged individualism”–that cultural doctrine of prioritizing personal success above all.

Shawn Shafner is an artist, educator and activist. Creator of The People’s Own Organic Power Project (www.thePOOPproject.org), he has catalyzed conversation about sustainable sanitation from the top of NYC’s largest wastewater treatment plant to the floor of the United Nations. Shawn will be Director of Bootstraps and Assistant Director of Training.

 

NevaHeadshot

photo by Harry Pocius

Neva Cockrell, Art Monastery Core Team Member, Board Member, is a dancer, choreographer and director. Recently returned from a 3-month tour performing with Pilobolus, followed be a spring residency in Dubai directing a new dance-theater performance.  This summer she will be the Assistant Director of the show and Director of Training, which features Catalyst Training.

 

photo by Ron Glow

Raphael Sacks, Art Monastery Core Team Member, is a singer, dancer, and theater maker. He has sung, danced, made theater and taught yoga in New York, Colorado, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Berlin, Stockholm, Dubai.  This summer he will be Director of Gardens & Facilities and a performer/co-creator of the show.

Kaitlin June is a voice-doula and a lover of sun, soil, and song. She has been receiving music her whole life from whatever land she stands on and loves to offer it back. Kaitlin is passionate about the role of Expressive Arts in the transformation of our world and helping to cultivate each individual’s unique voice in creating the new paradigm. This will be her first summer with the Art Monastery and she will be a performer/co-creator of the show.

 

Anaya Cullen, newest member of the Art Monastery Core Team (but already deeply has everyone wondering how we ever survived without her), is a costume designer, fabric dyer and collaborative artist who creates costumes and work for dance, theater and independent film. Her clients and projects from California to New York and France to Turkey, including State Street Ballet, Chautauqua Dance, Charlotte Ballet, Robin Bisio Films, Wonderbound, Keigwin + Company, AMDA LA, Josie Walsh, SB Art Museum Nights!, SB Contemporary Art Forum, and Catsi Dans. Anaya is the costume designer for the show, as well as Art Monastery Cruise Director.

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