How Many Selves Hide Inside Us?
Less than a week after I wrote “The Self Is Not Constant,” my latest post for this website, I came upon a TED talk by Shea Hembrey, a contemporary American artist. It’s perhaps the most extraordinary TED talk I’ve ever watched, and it dovetails nicely with my recent thoughts on the morphing self (and Hembrey will also teach you a trick or two about how to shoot flies with a BB gun).
Shea Hembrey spent some time traveling throughout Europe, attending one art biennial after another, and he found himself largely unmoved by a good bit of the work he encountered at those gatherings. His first idea was to create his own biennial, bring together a grouping of artists he admired. But the daunting logistics of contacting, organizing and presenting the work of a large number of, you might say, used or pre-owned artists, led him to another idea: he’d invent 100 artists, and present the varied work of those artist characters in an imaginary biennial.
And that’s what he did. Working for over two years, he came up with all those artists (106, actually, but six didn’t make the cut by the two curators he also invented) and their art, and the result is Seek, Hembrey’s biennial that is now collected into a hefty catalogue.
The art is amazingly varied: drawings, oil paintings, large installations, environmental art, videos, performance art, sculpture, photography, you name it. Hembrey has “found” a talented international array of artists, all of them born and bred–as he would say–in his head, heart and hands.
Here’s Hembrey at the TED talk introducing the work of an environmental artist who digs holes and then places giant mirrors at the bottom, to reflect the shifting canvas of the sky above (click to enlarge all photos).
And here he presents the work of a performance art duo who like to create “local traditions.” Here they are dancing in a cemetery in Tennessee, encouraging people to establish a ritual of dancing on the space that will one day host their graves.
Here’s the work of a South Korean artist, K. M. Yoon, a sculpture of stone and butterfly wings. “In flutterstone,” the catalogue states, “we are startled at seeing how the wings subtly rustle—a stone not of stasis, yet not going anywhere, just surely pulsing with life.”
And here’s a monumental installation piece by another of Hembrey’s invented artists:
And on and on it goes, one stunning work of art after another, each work created by yet another artist that Hembrey has created. What I’ve shown above is merely a small sliver of the artists Hembrey presents in his TED talk, which in turn only touches on a fraction of the artists that appear in his biennial catalogue. He’s the Fernando Pessoa of contemporary art, and like Pessoa he spins off and embodies the welter of voices within.
Like the poetry of Pessoa’s internal literary salon, Hembrey’s work utterly entrances me. I’m reminded of Stephen Marche’s masterpiece Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a faux-anthology of the writers of Sanjania, an island in the Atlantic ocean that doesn’t exist; or the multi-voiced novels of David Mitchell that burst with the weaving stories of a panoply of characters, like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. So I was not surprised to hear of Hembrey’s longtime interest in narrative, which he describes in an interview at the Cool Hunting website:
“Coming from the rural South, I grew up with a rich storytelling tradition. And, the quirky, colorful characters that I grew up around made me see the world as a place filled with fascinating individuals. Then as an undergraduate, I was also an English major toying with the idea of becoming a novelist. So, yes, I have always been fascinated by narrative and strong individual characters.”
Don’t most writers, over the course of a career, create their own biennial of characters? I’ve written and published scores of short stories, and each main character within those stories has to come alive inside me, a new separate shard of my various selves given wing, in order for a story to finally begin to breathe its own breath. Writers transform the multiple selves within into works of art, characters who then may pace the stage of a reader’s mind.
Everyone in the world sails along a current of competing voices. Many of us ignore these, or try to shape the ones they’re aware of into the small shoe of a single self. Writers, and artists of all sorts, and really any quiet soul regardless of audience, are the ones who manage to discover those selves and learn how to release them.
When Hembrey is asked, in that same interview, “Does it get confusing being so many people?” he answers, “The sheer number of artists was hard to manage, so I had to focus on just a few people at a time to stay organized and productive. Once I understood an artist and had his or her voice, then they were largely autonomous and then after making their work, I spoke about and thought of them as individuals separate from me.”
Why do we do this, what generating force sets us on this task? Speaking for myself, perhaps, in the aftermath of a childhood drama, for years I’ve been reassembling the broken pieces inside. Or perhaps not. I doubt I’ll ever truly know. Everyone attempts to craft a life path toward what most matters to them, though the reasons why are not so easily discovered.
Tagged with: Fernando Pessoa • Seek: Biennial Catalogue • Shea Hembry • TEDRecent Entries
- May 2023
- March 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- December 2021
- October 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- September 2020
- August 2020
- January 2020
- August 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- September 2018
- June 2018
- April 2018
- October 2017
- May 2017
- March 2017
- January 2017
- November 2016
- September 2016
- January 2016
- October 2015
- August 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- November 2014
- August 2014
- May 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- August 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- March 2013
- December 2012
- July 2012
- May 2012
- March 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
Blogroll
- 3bute
- 3quarksdaily
- 99% Invisible
- A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
- A Space for Image
- Adam Deutsch
- Alma Gottlieb
- American Nyckelharpa Association
- Asymptote
- Best in Portugal
- Brevity
- Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
- Caipirinha Lounge
- CinemaDivina
- Cooper Dillon Books
- Critical Mass
- Defunct Magazine
- Dispatches from Stay More
- Dzanc Books
- Emergency
- Fiction Writers Review
- Flavorwire
- Guernica
- HTMLGIANT
- Hunger Mountain
- identitytheory
- In Love with Lisbon
- Ivebeenreadinglately
- John Bresland Video Essays
- John Martyn
- Leite's Culinaria
- Like Fire
- McSweeney's Internet Tendency
- Mira's List
- Miriam's Well
- Moving to Portugal
- Mundo Pessoa
- My American Meltingpot
- NewPages Blog
- Ninth Letter
- Numero Cinq
- Oi Musica
- Open Letters Monthly
- Os Tempos Que Correm
- Patagonian Road
- Portuguese American Journal
- Powerhouse Arena
- Practicing Writing
- Quarterly Conversation
- Remembering English
- Richard Hoffman blog
- Rigmarole
- Rui Zink versos livro
- Sahelsounds
- shadowbox
- Significant Objects
- Songlines
- Spiritual Crossroads
- St. Petersburg Review
- The Alchemist's Kitchen
- The Book Bench
- The Brink of Something Else
- The Common
- The Education of Oronte Churm
- The Literary Saloon
- The Millions
- The Morning News
- The Mouth of the River
- The Rumpus
- The World's Fair
- The Writer and the Wanderer
- things magazine
- Three Percent
- Times Literary Supplement
- Tywkiwdbi
- Words without Borders
- Write the Book
- Writer Abroad
- Young and Hip
Rock on bad Santa!