Original score - Tim Cramer
Videographer/editor - Craig Youngren, second camera - Alice O’malley
Photography - Peter Matra
Costume - Stephanie Howard
Bag - Theresa Byrnes
Man - Rainer Evans
Stage-manger - Nick Piscatelli
Assistant - Roberta Bennett
Sparrow’s Godfather - Domo Castiglia
Produced & directed by T.Byrnes
The act of making art brings the artist into "the zone". We mirror the earth, the act of creation, because we are in essence the earth.
My performance art is eco-feminist - I refuse to join the treadmill of normalized global destruction while living a life exploring and understanding creative freedom. I began using trashed wood fragments to paint on in 2001, my hair as a brush in 2008, earth as pigment in 2011 and single-use plastic bags for mark making in 2019.
Making paintings with plastic bags has made me feel and see plastic bags as sacred. For months I have wet them, stained them, shaped, dried and imbedded them with my child's hair. My painting, a deep contemplation. Their marks are like organs, strangely familiar. Somewhere in the process the plastic bags were humanized, spiritualized and I realized they were immortal like God.
We want to live forever, be remembered. We fear death, of vanishing without a trace. Value is hinged on how long things will last not how graciously they will fall apart. I aim to remind us of the ultimate security - impermanence.
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FRESH by Theresa Byrnes
I am a plastic bag
No separation
The sound of plastic bags scrunching sends shivers down my spine
Do we know anything but divine balance
Spoilt children of peace
A manufactured piece bought with denial
Imagine a day without plastic, without torture, misunderstanding, genocide, betrayal
Particles of plastic, in the air, in the water
Plastic It is a part of us
And they say we can colonize another planet, when we are done with this one
Here we go again
But there is no place to run
The urban landscape is litter
Freedom in the throw, brilliance in carelessness
Thoughtlessness a privilege handed down to us since the 50’s
Am I dark or just aware
It marks every public space, the pattern of our disregard
The sound of plastic bags crumpling send shivers down my spine
Noose of shrink-wrap
Cigarette butts flicked
There is danger in worshipping anything eternal.
The performance will make a life size painting with plastic. During the course of the week long exhibition the "performance painting" will dry. On the 25th of September the "performance painting" will be hung and the raffle for the smaller "FRESH" paintings drawn.