I Do This To the Sun
Project Description
This is an intimate work, presented as an installation captured on film that will result in inviting the viewer to experience my exploration of re-imagining and moving within spaces. The film consists of three separate stanzas, which I've interpreted the word stanza from the Italian translation of "a little room." Each stanza is designed by my desire to curate a space where the performer embodies specific sensations over a duration of time. I create a mood for each ‘little room’ through its architecture, lighting design, furniture, and objects to build a dreamscape for me to inhabit and perform. Inside of these physical spaces, I’m hoping to create endless possibilities where a sensory experience can be felt and can live vicariously beyond the architecture as I’m exploring how space is a medium of how we remember. I believe this can be done anywhere, living within a world that we can transform and pretend inside of while developing a space unique to our needs. As a female artist, my work is rooted in feminist empowerment and my beliefs are embedded in the observations of my experiences as I investigate my body as an ecopoem. Ecopoetry is the idea of separating my body from reality; the rediscovery of myself as a home through its physical and internal sensations. Similar to ecopoems, familiar spaces can be reimagined and rearranged to create new environments. By focusing on what emotions arise from being in certain spaces, we can begin to experiment with discovering the possibilities of these spaces in how they can be attentive to our feelings and needs.
Choreography and Performance
Amanda Shell
Videography
Travis Gunville
Video Editing
Amanda Shell
Music
Beverly Laurel by Tame Impala
Into the Groove by Madonna
Man! I Feel Like a Woman! by Shania Twain
December, 1963 by The Four Seasons
Artist Statement
My work focuses on the idea that individuals live within a series of conglomerates that connects them to other entities that are universal. We’re all connected and thrive on our conglomeration as separate individuals, families, communities, countries, while we are all here living on Earth together. Through performances and the creation of my work, I’m inevitably connected to you through our connection to the ground- the soil we live on, and what fills our planet as we cohesively live alongside one another. My body moves and feels from sensation, as a radical way of thinking and creating. The essence of my art is questioning how a performance or action has the potential to impact a space. I transform familiar places by pretending and creating new environments through sensation. I find these new connections by recollecting memories through movement practice and/or found artifacts. I fill spaces with objects and energies that stimulate the senses in order to transport the spectator to specific times, places, and feelings from their past. My creative work personalizes the experience for the individual as they associate on a larger scale their relationships to space with their own objects, spirit, body, and movements. I am interested in transforming spaces through these questions; why are spaces filled with specific things and how does this impact perception?
