CHRIS TWOMEY’S “ASTRAL FLUFF” & THE SACRED MARRIAGE

"Whirling Dervishes" by Chris Twomey; 2010 (original image shot in 1987) 11” x 14” C print

Saturday APRIL 17^th, 7-11pm Creon Gallery on 24th Street

Chris Twomey: Astral Fluff: Carnal Bodies in Celestial Orbit

Chris Twomey's "Astral Fluff" installation at Creon Gallery, April 17, 2010

“The repetitive actions that make up our days become the grid or structure that supports the foundation and assumptions of our lives.  This endurance or resolve to keep going, to improve, and to continue implies a faith that the next moment will come, connoting a lightness of being which imbues our resolution with profound delicacy.”

Chris Twomey, 2010

Installation shot of Chris Twomey's "Astral Fluff"

Synchronicities abound!  I couldn’t imagine a more apt environment for my first public reading of Kundalini’s Daughter than Chris Twomey’s Astral Fluff: Carnal Bodies in Celestial Orbit which confronted me with the Whirling Dervishes of Selma Karaca’s native Turkey!

To begin, I encountered The Triumph of the XX, an authentic image of

embodiment following my Black Madonna experience, where I met Chris Twomey and was introduced to her work with the Madonna archetype!

" XX & XY" by Chris Twomey from the "XX Series"

"Astral Wall" by Chris Twomey

Could any woman who leapt into the unknown terrain of embedding a new archetype into her art could have imagined a time and space to transform from the “underground” writer to a public persona whose routine work of embodiment (expressed here in the images of kneading, braiding and lifting weights) is carrying her to the fluff of her dream world?

Chris has a technique of creating the marriage of heaven and earth in the material of photographic images, imbedding energy patterns of motion into the underlying space of the materialization of image.  The Sema involving the whirling represents the mystical ascent through the chakras to the perfection of the “sacred marriage.

"Astral Wall" by Chris Twomey

After being in Chelsea, for about a moment, and running into a car dealership, I was delighted to head to the eastward edge of the art world — to the Creon Gallery where I was transformed by my participation in this installation!  It seemed a logical conclusion to my process of “Applying the Heisenberg Principle to 21st Century Art.”  Particularly after I was told by the artist that the “intimate” reading event was inspired by the critic Robert C. Morgan reading sexual material written under his pen name at Sideshow Gallery.  I’m all for critics publicly confronting their Shadows!

The invitation was for an intimate reading and I couldn’t imagine anything more intimate than my selection from the book.  I was expecting an intimate crowd of women…

…what a surprise when so many men showed up!

Stefan Eins inside "Astral Fluff"

With the artist herself setting the tone by sharing a section of a script she wrote about passion on the Louisiana bayou, the readings that followed were indeed as intimate, carnal and contained as the environment!

EXPERIENCE A NEW INTIMACY!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StmANNpCpl8

Chris Twomey reading from her script

ranging from childhood explorations of dark matter…

Roberta Allen, author, artist and teacher

to “in flight” revelations about a professional quest sourced in family tragedy…

Holly Crawford - artist/art historian/ curator/director AC Institute

and “fictional flashes” of the sexual push and pull between male and female

Linda DiGusta - artist/writer/editor Resolve 40.com

…to the real life drama of sexually intertwined beings disappearing into archetypes (me).

Lisa Paul Streitfeld reading from "Kundalini's Daughter: Critical Trilogy, Vol. 1"

The authentic message underlying the readings was this: imagination fused with realism in a marriage of opposites revealing a new, integrated feminine energy embodying heaven and earth!

Stefen Eins whose exhibition at Creon opens April 21, 2010

and there were plenty of fab guys there to celebrate!

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, poet and critic at The Brooklyn Rail

Linda DiGusta with Marc Henry Johnson, Executive Director of Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center

I lingered after the crowd disappeared, searching for a sign that would encapsulate this experience of passage…and suddenly I found it!

A hexagram, the very symbol of the “sacred marriage”…

…embedded

Two couples spanning art, literature and film: Linda DiGusta and Mark Wiener; Marc Henry Johnson and his wife

into the very material of “Astral Fluff”!

SELMA KARACA’S KUNDALINI COUTURE

View from above. "The Alchemy of Love: Air"

Venus Moon Conjunction: 16 March, 2010: 6:39 AM EDT NYC

VENUS AND THE SPIRAL

Venus as the Evening Star (Vesper) passed through the Second Gate (the Third Eye) at 6:39 AM.  Making precise contact with the Moon so close to the horizon translates from Heaven to Earth as quick action, aka THE QUICKENING.  The gains of Venus in her active Morning Star (Lucifer) phase move into action.  In other words, Venus is pulled Full Speed Ahead, spiraling through the chakras by no strenuous efforts of her own.

The authentic feminine emerges as a new (Aries Sun) form (Saturn in Virgo in the 6th house) of Beauty (Moon and Venus in Taurus). Venus rules the chart and Vesper emerges with her own timing and power, while the Sun (Aries in the 12th house) and Mars (Leo in the 4th house) remain out of sight.  The pressure is on as we are headed for another Uranus/Saturn opposition on April 28, the last opposition with Saturn in Virgo, which means the form of the new archetype of the feminine will emerge at this time, as Uranus heads for the crossing the meridian at O degrees Aries, the point of my rising sign!

So, where else would I go to find this new form but the last outpost for authentic art in New York City…

BUSHWICK!!

I went to visit Selma Karaca, who lives in her studio in the McKibben Street Loft building, which is one of the last artist communities in the city.

The Bushwick studio of Selma Karaca

Selma, the hardest working artist I know, has created the form for the 21st century woman: the spiral.   Only an Aquarian could come up with something so deceptively simple — and utterly profound!

To arrive at this liberation of form, she created a foundation from the very structures that once confined women, the hoop skirt and the corset, that remain on her racks.

"Waterfall" by Selma Karaca, "EVOLVER: Wake Up and Dream," February 2, 2007

Beginning with this foundation, in the traditional female structures of confinement, Karaca innovated a path through the opposites of her Aquarian sun sign, Uranus and Saturn, to innovate new forms of liberation for female attire.  For example, eternity was structured into her “Waterfall” dress, the figure-eight form representing the “sacred marriage” of inner and outer.  Holding the tension of the opposites of tradition (Saturn) and innovation (Uranus), this breakthrough was celebrated at the “Woman of the 21st Century” installation at EVOLVER: Wake Up and Dream.

Selma Karaca's "Waterfall" at Wake Up and Dream, Feb. 2, 2007

Engaging in the spiral of Karaca's Kundalini Couture

I have been shedding my clothes over the years, so I will have nothing but her spiral dresses.  They feel so amazing, I never want to take them off!

We innovated costumes illuminating the evolution of the kundalini in the chakras for The Alchemy of Love

FIRE

WATER

EARTH

AIR

Selma immigrated to this country from her native Turkey speaking little English and with little else than her immense talent and a dream.   She kept true to her vision of creating a liberating form for women, working day and night, while piling up one award after another.  She confronted the fashion world with its power struggles and pressures and turned her back on it.  She pressed on until she found her niche: craft shows where she has been stunning participants with her breathtakingly beautiful, yet — get this –uncommonly wearable art that molds to the individuality of the female body.  Women wear her clothes; rather than the clothes wearing the women, as is the case with commercial designers. She  proudly showed me her latest prize: Best of Show in the Boston Crafts Fair this past weekend.  How far she has come in redefining wearable art as an everywoman everyday experience!  ”When I applied for a visa,” she said, “I was told that fashion isn’t considered art.”

That was then.  This is now!   Selma is preparing to integrate her love of Tango with her art, by pulling together a Kundalini Couture fashion show with Tango dancers!   With all the obstacles she had to break through in this still patriarchal world, Selma Karaca, who retained her Turkish connection to the Goddess through all her travails,  is the most authentically liberated woman I know!

Selma showing me her tango outfit

Selma Karaca

ARRIVAL

“Arriving means never arriving,”

– Aldo Tambellini

more photos of Aldo

BOOMERANG!!!

New York Post, Friday April 2, page 38

I posted on March 26 about an impromptu piece of performance art I curated “on the spot” for “A Call to Revolution!”

http://kundalinisdaughter.wordpress.com

It was picked up by THE NEW YORK POST and published the following Friday, April 2!

The Bowery has played host to CBGB, homeless bums and, more recently, upscale museums, hotels and bars. But now there’s an underground art scene straight out of the debauched ’60s era of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Collective Hardware, housed in a rundown building between Broome and Delancey streets that used to be Weiss Hardware, has nothing to do with wrenches. Instead, it’s a five-floor party-studio-gallery-music space filled with a never-ending parade of pretty people, downtown artists and hangers-on.

Last Thursday, at a launch party for the nonprofit Fund Art Now, jazz floated through the first-floor gallery from a rented Steinway. On the second floor, members of the cool set were lounging, either getting a trim from the Astor Place haircutters while sipping a no-brand cocktail from a makeshift bar or participating in a séance — there’s an oversized hand-painted Ouija board on the floor.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/hour_arty_people_mBLGTOcn5Zgj0AJuU7S1UP#comments#ixzz0k2ZvQ6aS

Resulting in dire pronouncements from other bloggers;

http://evgrieve.com/2010/04/cliches-threaten-to-implode-collective.html

I discovered that it is forbidden to put your own Internet address along with your comment on the NY Post site:.  So, the best I could do is deliver a cliche sound bite:

Lisapaul1000: You had to be there

Due to expert timing, as I have been practicing with my strategically planned shamanic performances, both public and private, of the past ten years, I lived my own 21st century philosophy, of being interpreter to a unique phenomenon in which I was both participant and observer!

Lisa Paul Streitfeld delivering her paper, "Applying the Heisenberg Principle to 21st Century Art" at the 2009 AICA Congress in Dublin, Ireland