Artist Statement, of sorts

And from Her stellar womb they shall manifest:

Violent hearted Elementals breaking the Dawn of Peace.

Descendants of warlocks, witches with ill glitches--

The ones who do Revolts, Rebirths and Resurrections.

Charmed ones with ancient Grammar.

--Scottie Saturn

I'm starting to see this blog as a type of creative project of sorts so I thought it necessary to provide a little statement, of sorts:

Vilem Flusser writes that we find ourselves in a period of expulsion, to survive we must take the chaos around us and interpret it as data—a conversion synonymous with creation. This act of conversion is the primary subject of my art making practice. The illusion of “home” and the fabrication of desire inform my work both conceptually and formally.

Since moving to southern California, I have been particularly drawn to the alienating quality of the suburban landscape. I am interested in the fantasy of escape and how westward expansion has created sites of excess made to entice. Man’s desire to control and confine nature versus the desire to ‘return to nature’ creates formidable tension. Through a lens of female subjectivity I examine this desire for the landscape to be something it isn’t. Through my art I construct narratives and imagined realities.

I explored this desire to create imagined narratives and realities during the process of directing play by Suzan-Lori Parks entitled The Death of the Last Black Man. Innovative and occasionally controversial, Parks is one of the most highly acclaimed African-American woman playwrights in contemporary theater. Her use of “rep & rev” (repetition and revision) to re-examine and reconfigure eurocentric historical episodes is lauded for providing an afrocentric history and identity—elements that are largely missing from the eurocentric historical record. Parks uses language reminiscent of African-American dialects and vernacular to give multiple meanings to the spoken word and expose the hidden message behind the dialogue of her characters. Often depicting and exaggerating black stereotypes, Parks draws attention to their invalidity and the ignorance upon which they are based. Parks's plays are noted for their originality, non-linear progression of time, poetic dialogue, political and social agendas, and depiction of the search for identity.

She speaks of the Hole of History, both an imaginary empty space on stage which is then filled with the action of the place, and also a very literal place created from the fragmented, distorted, and plagarized history of African Americans and the diapora.

I find that in my work I like to explore this hole, this chthonic realm where the bones of history are buried. And as Suzan says in the introduction of her anthology of plays The American Play and Other Works:

"One of my tasks as a playwright is to locate the ancestral burial ground—dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down."


Here is a clip from an HBO series called Blacklist