For the Love of Art – Art Center of Sarasota
Winters with you
Touching celestial waters
of thought
Bracing myself for the
winters to come
Dancing between beats
of devotion
A song with sweet and bitter notes
I well rest the winters with you.
SHIFT at MOCA
NiteTalk: Juan Carlos Zaldivar Strikes an Optic Nerve at MOCA
His Jose Marti and I mixed seance and striptease to celebrate a real Cubano hero. His 90 Miles spanned the distance between an exile’s heart and his home. And in Soldier’s Pay he teamed with David O. Russell and Tricia Regan to uncover the effect the Iraq War had on all those involved. He’s a Sundance Fellow, an Emmy nominee, and one of the most vividly astute visualists now operating in Miami. He is video artist/filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar, and this Friday his SHIFT finds him paired with sculptor Anja Marais and among the fine ffinalists in MOCA’s Optic Nerve 14.
What’s the big idea behind SHIFT? SHIFT is a five minute featuring Anja Marais short made from over 10,000 photos taken over a period of 1½ years. Everything you see is happening in front of a time-lapse camera, one frame at a time. Every five second shot took an average of 4-5 hours to shoot and many more to prep. The film follows the life of a character who is born from a tree and whose face is stolen by a wild dog. After wandering the landscape reflecting its environment, looking for home, our character’s vision returns in an unsuspecting turn of events.
How’d you and Anja initially come to connect? Anja and I met at a Creative Capital professional artist development workshop. We immediately felt an affinity for each other’s work. I pictured motion whenever I looked at one of her pieces and so I asked her if she ever thought about animating them. She said she would love to but she had never done it, so we began to talk. What I loved about collaborating with Anja was that she did not say, “I have this film idea…”; instead we read each other’s artist statements and began to highlight concepts and ideas that we had in common and the story grew from those conversations.
Is this the first time you two collaborated? Yes, this is the first project we do together.
Are there plans for another? No solid plans yet, but we would totally work together again.
Juan Carlos Zaldivar’s Shift screens Friday September 14, 7pm and 9pm at MOCA’s Optic Nerve 14. For more information log on here.
You can read the full article here
Color, you foe.
Notebook:Miami:2012
Color seduces, color delights but most importantly color lies. Behind too many fuchsias are the lack of form, under too many cobalts structural problems and with a blinding lake of streaks and swipes the cover-up of no skill.
Black and white are the guards at the temple gates. They will tolerate no thieves, no liars and no con-man to pass. Through these gates walked men like Goya, Rothko, Kentridge, the Zenga painters and many a master. Only the man who has conquered black and white also has conquered color.
Persimmons in the morning
Persimmons
dripped from
dry branches
Soft orange
flesh embraced
the hidden pit
Wax skin
glistened
in sun
Do you
remember
me silently
walking past
While your
round body
awaited
my hand
