prompt:: Issue 1: Workbook for a Performance & Movements through a Collaboration
Departing from a common interest in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and To the Lighthouse, Crain and Wolowiec’s collaboration unfolds through analogy into a multiplicity of echoing forms, centering on the patterned motion of ocean currents, the choreography of bodies in space, the production of paper, and the ebbing flow of the text that may give meaning to the page.
Crain’s Workbook for a Performance & Movements through a Collaboration charts a continuity between the pseudo-tidal motions of paper-making and the movements of water at a shoreline and at sea. Through revolving renderings for sculptural forms mirrored in verso by the larger geography of a nautical map, Crain elaborates upon previous conceptualizations of a performance in which performers embody the movements of global currents. The sculptures become both elements of that choreography and functional apparatuses evocative of traditional paper-making mechanisms, returning Crain’s research notes and sketches to the substrate to which they are wedded.
Wolowiec’s Workbook for a Performance moves through the literal pages of Woolf’s text, selecting fragments that feel almost like the breaths between words. Gathering up the articles and conjunctions whose semantic functions mimic those of water—filling in the cracks of phrases or settling between other ideas—Wolowiec recollects these fragments, isolated on the page, to form recursive patterns and currents of thought. In content, the workbook vibrates with the flow of its original text; in its form, it references Wolowiec’s past and ongoing experiments with language and paper-making. Enfolded within the pages of displaced text, a cut paper sample traces both of the artists’ hands in shared labor during Wolowiec’s recent residency at Dieu Donné in New York.