PRESS RELEASE
The Third Annual Exquisite Corpse Exhibition plus Day of the Dead Altars.What: Art Exhibition
When: Reception October 28th
Time: 5:00PM until 9:00 PM.
The show will be up through the weekend. 10:00AM 4:00PM.
Where: Ramona Town Hall, the East Wing.
729 Main Street, Ramona, CA 92065
Come dressed as your favorite dead person (famous or not!)
For the third year artist Helen Wilson invited a group of fellow artists to play the game "Exquisite Corpse." This is a game by which a collection of images is assembled by the group to form bodies. The game was invented by the Surrealists; and earned its name from one of the initial writings, "Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). It is the perfect game for creating Art for a Halloween Exhibition. This group plays the game with a bit of a twist. The body is broken into proportionally correct sheets of paper, i.e. the head is around 1/8 of the body. First they word associated body parts to warm up. For example, what does an arm make you think of? Then they all draw, one body part at a time. The results are then put on the floor where each of the artists chose a body, one part at a time.
This is where they really change the game; everyone goes home with his or her body and they agreed to reassemble for the exhibition. Once home, their body was the inspiration for a piece of art. Everyone is working with a 2’ x 4’ format, but materials are open ended. The only obligation was to their art and to keep the sense of play - after all it is a game. No one has seen all the finished work.
In the mean time in October the group started a new project, constructing Day of the Dead Altars. More than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death. It was a ritual the indigenous people had been practicing for at least 3,000 years, a ritual known today as Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. In the United States and in Mexico, families build altars in their homes, dedicating them to the relatives who have passed. They surround these altars with flowers, food and pictures of the deceased. They light candles and place them next to the altar. In some homes the altar is not only dedicated to friends and family members who have died, but to others as well. These festivities show that syncretism is particularly important in cultural expressions like theology, mythology, and the representational arts, all of which are present in the contemporary diversity of Día de los Muertos. The group will be building artistic altars to people or causes that are important to them.
