Indelible Dance commissioned me to create a video to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's music, as part of their upcoming instructional performance & dance film, Ritual, pertaining to the daily self care ritual that the Artistic Director, Robin Cantrell, has created for herself during the pandemic quarantine, channeling healing energy through art. Through a series of instructions to the audience, my video comes on after the visitors have already meditated and cleared their mind.
Buddhists believe viewing mandalas brings awareness into the mind-stream of the observer, activating their profound potential for enlightenment. Retaining my interest in the Buddhist mandala, research in neurology and psychology, the video focuses the eye to the moving mandala in the center, and the background sets the mood to radiate positive energy. During the filming with the dancers, the themes we explore revolve around nature, particularly the communication between mycelium and tree roots, as well as the dancers’ soul animals. I had also filmed on a microscopic level nature bits, such as dirt, flowers, mushrooms, tree bark and fungus, compiling them as the moving background to metaphorically ground the work as an artistic ecosystem of nature. The result of this collaborative and multi-themed process is a fantastical and ever-changing mandala composed of the dancers, within an abstract storyline that embodies a theatrical cycle of birth, growth and creativity.
The lineage of this commissioned video comes from a four year process of works and research, which started through my interest in neurology and multi-sensory therapy for cognitive disabilities. In Orchid Rorschach, I consulted psychologists and therapists about color and visual movement interactions, making specialized optical illusions for dementia elderly, maintaining visual tension, difference and interest to tap certain parts of the brain that release dopamine, a crucial loss of development in dementia. At the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House's Arts for Dementia program, the elderly stared intensely, some clapped happily, others uttered words associating the optical illusions with females. My personal experience of neuroplasticity through studying dance results in Movement, a body of video artworks reflecting ever-changing neural pathways, merging Orchid Rorschach's neurology and psychology research, resulting in scintillating and painterly colors, shapes and visual movements. As my body learns to perform complex movements, the visuals evolve to become more free, maximally tapping into the energy of the mind-body connection to organically channel my artistic intuition. This lineage of neurology driven video artworks continue in Heart Mandala, merging the scientific research and mind-body transformation processes of Orchid Rorschach and Movement, to incorporate the study of Tibetan murals and the mandala, Buddhist spiritual symbols of the cosmos, to understand their powers to initiate change in thinking and opening the mind to a new reality of inner peace, where the practitioner cultivates compassion through meditation while visualizing these images. This four year cycle of research and energy flow into the process of creating Ritual.