Release Piece, 2024 — lydia kern

Release Piece (sculpture & activation performance)
sunflowers collected after last year’s flood, bouquets past their prime dropped off my porch by friends, wooden dowels, garden twine, bio torch fuel, blowtorch, witnesses, ben’s harmonium, june night fall, 6x4’, looping video piece 2024

Release Piece explores invisible emotional structures and processes for containment and release, for organization, for witnessing- another form of portal. A calendar, a quilt, a window, a method of vision. Rosalind Krauss talks about the grid being a visioning device for artists- the invisible structure behind the painting, a method of organization. How acute occurrences in our personal & collective lives can reorient our relationship to time, they can rearrange our methods of vision.

{How my dear friend Ben sang his song “power zone” on the harmonium as we all gathered outside, how chords carried everyone along as I lit the grid, how everyone got quiet as it went up in flames. How loud the crackling and spitting of the fire was, how the looping water sounds from the video grid emerged again as the fire dimmed & quieted, how water flowing had the final say.}

The whole grid was completely consumed in less than 5 minutes. While I watched, a fact I had learned recently came to mind: emotions pass through us biologically for only 90 seconds- stimuli create chemical reactions in the brain that are brief, but our cognitive selves extend the experience by processing, creating emotional loops in the ‘refractory period’. It’s interesting to me that time is the factor that distinguishes moods (hours/days), from temperaments (weeks/months), from traits (years).

Having much to grieve and witness is part of our modern condition. What kind of emotional loops, reactions & actions do we form beyond the initial 90 second white hot response? How do we allow our witnessing to make us more open, attuned to our sense of interconnection rather than overwhelm & shut down? How can what we see change our vision, change the way we interpret those in power? How to grieve and also stay open to the many hopeful possibilities occurring in the midst of many aftermaths?

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ben's harmonium (release piece)

ben's harmonium (release piece)

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