An Atlas of Absence: An On-line Meeting Performance, 2020
Technology was supposed to connect us. The dominant modality for communication and connection during this pandemic era is the digital screen. In this work, collaborators Laura Boles Faw and Summer Mei Ling Lee continue their ongoing series addressing distance and longing that increasingly figures into this heightened moment. Through the Zoom platform, they host an encounter in which guests to the “meeting” confront the artists grappling with the boundaries of absence and presence, here and there, time and the infinite through an arc of emotions and strategies ranging from coincidence to confusion. Through this work, they explore how to meaningfully meet in a place that also documents the deprivation of being together — without altering our understanding of closeness and connection.
An Atlas of the Invisible, 2019
An Atlas of the Invisible, 2018. Collaboration with Laura Boles Faw.
(52 hand-written letters in invisible ink, 52 lightbulbs each side, projection, arduino board and alphabet, and mirrors.)
Technology was supposed to connect us.
For the exhibition re:home, Summer Lee and Laura Boles Faw have created an installation and a performance as a continuation of a series of collaborative performances and installations on the themes of displacement, communication, and the flight of the creative class from San Francisco. The work is built from the act of correspondence between the two artists who live on opposite coasts since the recent departure of Boles Faw from San Francisco after 13 years living there as an artist and educator.
Since this summer, the artists have written each other in invisible ink that when exposed to the flame of a candle becomes visible, sometimes legible, and occasionally consumed. This form of correspondence is slow, at times ludicrously so. It is private, intimate, and ephemeral in its making and its revealing. For the installation, the artists assembled these correspondences into a tangle of rudiment technologies, mirroring their art-making process whereby Boles Faw is physically absent — employing different forms of technology, for better or for worse, to craft a collaborative work.
Lightbulbs run in a confusion from a central program board to blink off a code to each body of letters, “I keep forgetting to tell you,” and “There’s nothing like being here together with you.” A projector casts video of letters being unveiled and consumed.
The artists would like to thank Melanie Piech for her invaluable work of programming the signaling lights and building the outlet board component of the installation.
À DIEU
Collaborative Performance with Laura Boles Faw after her departure from San Francisco.
‘I am writing to ask for your participation in a performance next week in San Francisco. Á Dieu is a performance with Summer Lee in which I am saying goodbye to the city and the arts community (as many of you know, I am moving to Philadelphia in the next month or so). The performance will take place between the French Consul’s home on a hill and participants in Cole Valley that lies below (my neighborhood of 13 years). Candace Huey of re.riddle has curated an exhibition titled After Tomorrow in the home and writes of the exhibition and performance.” — Laura Boles Faw
“I was recently asked to curate an exhibition for the French Consulate in San Francisco about the intersections of art and technology. With that in mind, I invited several artists to examine the various ways in which technology may be applied or implicated in their art, and within their larger cultural context. Summer Lee and Laura Boles Faw created a performance piece that addresses both the themes of technology and the challenges of living and working as artists in San Francisco.” Candace Huey of re.riddle
(Video Documentation by Hoi Leung)
Boles Faw wrote a goodbye letter to Lee, the city and its arts community with invisible link. Lee, positioned in the window of the house, revealed this message and subsequently, using Morse code, flashed the message out into the city from the home of the French Consul overlooking Boles Faw’s neighborhood of thirteen years. Boles Faw asked her friends and colleagues to stand within the city and signal back to Lee with flashes of light that they are not only receiving the message but also proclaiming their presence and dedication to the supportive and vibrant Bay Area arts community. The participants are artists, arts educators, students, curators, and others who are involved in the arts and who Boles Faw considers beacons of artistic determination.
Thank you to Melanie Piech, Mel Day, Beth Molnar, Michele Foyer, Christy Chan, Hoi Leung and Jen Pearson for participating in this project and thank you to Candace Huey of re.riddle for support of this project.