december fotoplay : gallery 5

In earlier posts, here and here, I wrote about my holiday card ritual, and why it is a challenging, but nevertheless, ongoing yearly project. What I haven’t written about is the other (perhaps common but still gratifying) aspect of the yearly card ritual, which is that once a year, it allows me to reconnect with a motley crew of seemingly disparate people, most of whom I don’t see at all, or haven’t seen for years. This year’s Fotoplay card has led to some reconnections that have actually brought me to tears, like the one I’m about to describe…

I haven’t seen my old friend from Hampshire College, Shana, in more than twenty years. We talk occasionally, by email or through the yearly holiday card exchange, but it’s been quite awhile since we’ve had the kind of conversation we had a few nights ago. The work you see above was created in a collaboration, between Shana and her daughter Phoebe, who just returned from her first semester away at college. (For the record, Shana has invited me to share her story in full, as she feels it might be helpful for others to hear about it.) Here is part of the email Shana sent to me, which tells about her experience with Phoebe, creating their mask, “Let’s Stop Being Afraid of Talking:”

Dear Marcie,

Your Fotoplay card could not have come at a better time, and I just don’t know how to thank you. As you know, for the past few years, my relationship with Phoebe has been stressful and difficult. But this past year things got worse, and with Phoebe leaving for college, it was all the more upsetting. I won’t go into it all, I’ll save the details for another time. We’ve been in therapy, we’ve tried to work things out. We’ve tried to understand why there is always so much tension between us. And therapy helped somewhat. But the ragged edges didn’t really smooth out. If anything, the more we understood the reasons we hurt each other, the better we got at repeating our hurtful patterns. And then, along came your card. Phoebe went to your blog and started reading about collaborative art-making, and she became very inspired. (You know she is studying art and photography in college, and she tells me that she’s “kind of exploding, seeing the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard with creepy masks, studying, really studying Picasso…”) Anyway, it was Phoebe’s idea for us to cut the card up and recreate it as a mask. And when we got to the mouth, something happened. It was like a meteor hit the house. Or maybe like the floor dropped out from us. We argued, we couldn’t agree on what to do about the mouth. Should it smile? Should it be open? Closed? And Phoebe got so upset that she grabbed a handful of toothpicks and shoved them into the mouth of the mask and screamed “Here I am again, me with a mouth full of toothpicks, not ever able to say what I really think because you’ve always got everything all figured out!” And that did it. We looked at each other. I cried like maybe I’ve never cried. And I heard her. I somehow heard her, for the first time. Seeing that image of the mouth hole with the pointy toothpicks made me sick. I heard her… So that’s about it, Marcie. That’s how the mask came to be, and that’s how I got to see inside the black hole in my relationship with Phoebe.

For me, it’s an affirmation of the power of so many things: collaborative art-making; the concept of a mask and what the act of making a mask can lead to; the power of the image; the power of seeing an image; what images tell us that words can’t possibly describe…

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I’ve received a few other startling and strange pieces this week…

The piece above was created by a woman I know from a yoga workshop, who is now a yoga teacher in western Massachusetts. For the past few years, Sara has begun each morning by making a collage. She calls her Fotoplay collage, “I Opened the Mind of the Thinker.” I love how she cut up my words from the back of the card and reordered them to read as a concrete poem: “looking out / you can see much more / it’s not work / you’ll soon see / this playground…”

This next series of four images was created by our friend Simon, a psychologist who has always used the Rorschach test as a tool in his sessions with patients. Since receiving these images I’ve been reading everything I can find on the Rorschach test. And I confess that I have also made a bunch, plopping blobs of paint on paper, folding, and then unfolding, for the “reveal/revelation.” Simon told me that the image above is “Me in the Morning.” And the images that follow are: “Me in the Afternoon, Me in the Evening, and Me in My Dreams.”

This last cool and creepy card was made by a friend, Markus, who is an engineer in Switzerland. Deceptively simple–two holes + light– in that inimitable Swiss way…