Tag: sadness

Jo Spence, Narratives of Dis-ease: Included, 1990, Collaboration with Tim Sheard, Colour photograph, 63.5 x 41 cm

Jo Spence, Photo Therapy: The Bride (with Rosy Martin), 1984–86

Jo Spence Rosy Martin, and Rick Miller, Photo Therapy: Work on Emotional Eating (with Rosy Martin), ca. 1990, chromogenic colour print.

Yoko Ono, Stone Piece, from The Riverbed, 2015

Since the early 1960s, audience participation has been a crucial aspect of Ono’s work. To make a village is a political gesture, as well as a formal one. Audience participation is key to completing the THE RIVERBED through everyday action coupled with contemplation; they are collaborators with the artist, similar to the collaboration between the artist and the two galleries. Additionally, it is significant to Ono that all three “principals”— the artist and two gallery leaders—are female; the support and participation of women in power is one of Ono’s longstanding concerns.

Conceived as two room-sized installations shown in two spaces—a whole in two parts— visitors are encouraged, via instructions, to visit both spaces in order to experience and fully understand THE RIVERBED. Both galleries will have a pile of large river stones that Ono has selected and gathered. She will inscribe the words like remember, dream, and wish on the stones, which have been honed and shaped by water over time. Visitors may pick up a stone and hold it in their lap, concentrating on the word and letting go of their anger or fear, transforming the stone into an emotional object to be placed upon the pile of stones in the center of the room.

Song After Sadness

by Katie Ford

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are 
that which must be made 
servant only to salt, only 
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into 
the exhibit of birches 
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels 
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling, 
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful 
I praise. I praise the human, 
gutted and rising.