I haven’t known how to describe a transition my work and myself, my focus, are going through in the last, perhaps several, years. Perhaps this new work is a way to touch and describe some things, along the passage to some other state.
I have been cultivating this new work since April of this year, and for a good portion of this time I have had the generous and vigorous support of movement artist and dancer Lorraine Lau to bring things into being. I’m so grateful!
Please come and share in what we have to give. As with most of my work, ‘The Metamorph’ will remain in an on-going state, as we evolve it and learn more about it. So, more to come. But for one night, you will see it the way it will be for that one time only. Please come!
“The Metamorph”
by 2016 Neddy Artist Awards Finalist Mandy Greer
Friday, October 7th
Performance 6-8pm, with light refreshments
Audience members are free to come and go anytime between 6-8pm, participate, touch, or just watch. Performance space is limited to 25 people at a time but free movement and wandering in and out of the space are welcome. “The Neddy Artist Awards: 20 Years” Exhibition will be open, as well. All ages. Free. Presented by Cornish College of the Arts.
An installation of ceremonial bread and sweets will be offered by Fallow Collective.
Multi-media artist Mandy Greer presents an aggregation of durational performance, participatory fiber-based installation and knowledge sharing, inviting you into an experience that upends the hierarchy of audience and artist. Using the physicality and metaphor of weaving, all who touch and twist fiber are intertwined in the subtle metamorphic passage of flesh into glittering stone, erupting ash, dust, animal and flesh again. Greer transforms the detritus of our contemporary textile waste stream into timeless, elegant and raw conglomerations of inscrutable nature and the underbelly of human ceremonial imagination. By reclaiming the cast-offs of ‘fast fashion’ and reinvesting the material with painstaking hand-work, we are invited to enquiry on how value and meaning are ascribed, erased and altered.
Participatory installation by Mandy Greer
Choreography and direction by Lorraine Lau and Mandy Greer
Performed by Lorraine Lau
with Berit Astley, Mandy Greer, Paul Margolis, and Hazel Margolis
Sound by Mandy Greer and Hazel Margolis
See The Metamorph Preview video here!
#neddyartistawards2016
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We are all both monster and ocean, soft blanket and hard stone, ridged endurance and tender ripple. The lightest touch that lasts beyond time. To survive, we must weave ourselves into the lives of others. We are all melting back into the universe from where we came. We are all in this together. Hands working together build not just a fabric of reality, but invisible potent emotional ties. Layers of time become a text that only fingers can read, ash and dust transfigured into line. Nothing is stable, not even the ground beneath feet, as unseen forces bend, melt, shift, make and remake. Ties to this life are tied and untied. Love is such magma, pulsing and crushing twisted layers that rise and fall, blending one into another. Smooth stone washed, hardened scarred lines and silver stretches become who we are. Out of chaos, weaving is about two opposing forces that balance to create something stable, functional, vital. Without the tension and subtle force on thread, all would fall apart. You can trace a thread through time, touch made into protection, cloth into refuge, and sensation the mediator of the fragile body. Thread, a line, a narrative of human invention strung together. An asking, a hiding. We are all both monster and ocean.
‘The Metamorph’ is formed from giant garments and weavings influenced by how the geologic record hidden below our feet becomes a text recording the every-changing passage of matter through time. Ground seems solid to human perception, but it is not. This disconnect mimics our own human sense of time, where upheavals and traumas become hidden or revealed in the body, where layers upon layers of healing and psychic scarring through time make up who we are. The body and geologic time move through tumult, stillness, destruction, age and rebirth. Throughout human cultural production, weaving has been used to describe the way we construct space and time, making order from chaos. The free, non goal-oriented weaving process of this experiential installation allows all hands to record the layers of time spent with The Metamorph as she moves through the passages of transfiguration.
image film stills by Dylan Ward
Mandy Greer 
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