'Move Through' positions the audience to use their imagination to sense loss through fantasy, fiction and reality. Together-audience and Juliacks will create a safe space where participants are welcome to share their experiences and access the unknown.

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

October 31st: Candles n' Conversations

With the permission of the cemetery director, Ari Pipatti, and with the help of my Finnish friend Saara Ratilainen we respected the changing of the seasons and the ones that have passed.

In the midst of the All Saints Day holiday tradition of people bringing candles to the graves of relatives, I provided the means to make hand sculpted candles out of soft wax for free as a way to start a conversation.

I learned about how cemetery visitors felt and what the holiday means to people who go to the cemetery and sometimes who they were remembering.

Documentation by Kate Fox

Production manager: Addison Kemp

Look out for a video coming soon!

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

October 16th: American Voices Seminar in Turku, Finland.

My topic: Loss and American Folk Art

To the right are a few of the clips I showed.

You can view the presentation text here.

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

October 4th: Swell play reading in Lappland.

Fellow Fulbrighters and I traveled to Kilpisjarvi in Finland. There, we found a beautiful barren landscape.

I have just finished the script for the play, "Swell." and we did a reading of it in this amazing smoke hut.

Each person came to the hut by themselves and took a potato out of my hat. On the potato was a picture of the character that they would read. I then told them about their character, and told them to think of a word or a sound that they associated with loss.

The reading of the play was similar to a passover Seder where we would read the script, but also take breaks to talk about the sounds/words of loss that they thought of, and also to make toasts to death, to life, to them, to the fire, and to the unconscious.

This preliminary reading is being developed into a performance for the Night of Live Art at the Theater Academy in Finland December 2nd-4th and in Pori, Finland on December 5th.

Photos by Alicia Viani.

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

October 1st: Musical and live drawing performance at a hospice in Helsinki.

Fellow Fulbrighter-Melanie Lahti and I performed at a Hospice where she played Bach on the clarinet and I drew live with an overhead projector. The main point was to not provoke or disturb the patients and provide a pleasant experience.

This experience taught me that the Finnish/English language barrier should be addressed as the goals of the performance may not be achieved without linguistic understanding.

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

September 23-26th Visiting the ANTI FESTIVAL in Kuopio with Live Art Masters students.

Also-questions I am thinking about..please respond if you want to answer them:

What do Finnish people dream about death?

Have you ever seen a dead body?

What fantasies, myths and visions do Finnish people engage with to deal with death?

When you die, how do you want your body to be treated?

Would you ever invent a death ritual?

Do you believe in Ghosts, Spirits, Angels, God?

How do you respond to flesh? Blood? Sickness? Fluids?

Have you ever killed something? A machine? A person? An animal?

How will Finnish people react when encountering death or grief?

Do you believe in the spectrum of the unconscious being analogous to the spectrum of light?

How do you react to someone you know having died or dying?

How do you want to die?

Do you believe in fairytales, myths, the sun, the infinite universe?

What kind of funeral do you want?

Silence, solitude, what senses, what social settings are appropriate when respecting the dead in Finland?

What do you think will happen to you after you die?

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

September 12th & 13th: Helsinki Comic Festival

Emelie Ostegren and I are exhibiting together at the festival. We have created 'The Sweet Spot' next to our table.

The Sweet Spot is a drawing space, a place for conversations with masks, portraiture, and visions of loss.

You can see Emelie Ostegren with stuff for festival on tram pictured on the right side.

UPCOMING EVENTS

2009 - 2010: Fulbright Year in Helsinki, Finland! Project Title: Exploring Psychological and Physical Worlds.

While collaborating with Finnish artists, I will be creating a series of site-specific performances and performances in fabricated environments derived from comics, that filmed will create a narrative about a Finnish woman's inner and exterior worlds.

In addition, I will be studying at the Theater Academy in Finland in the masters program of Live Art and Performance Studies.

I will also be assisting the art therapist, Eungyung Kim.

Keep a look out for more information and soon-weekly comics.

The image to the right is taken from The Early Tremors of Rody Plane..a book I plan to continue working on while I'm in Finland.......

July 31st: Animation and Video Art Screening at Synchronicity in Los Angeles curated by Ben Bigelow. Below is a still from the Animation by Amy Johnson and I...

other artists in the show include: Ben Bigelow Paper Rad Lilli Carre Santiago Vernetti Steve Bishop Suzie Silver + Hillary Harp Hooliganship + Cassandra C Jones Gregory Witt Michael Mallis Matthew Thurber + Rebecca Bird Mike Pisano Chris Cornwell Eileen Maxson Hazel Hill Alexis Gideon e*rock (Eric Mast) Souther Salazar Jesse Hulcher

June 16th-July 18th: F.I.N.E. Artist Residency at the Children's Museum in Pittsburgh with Amy Johnson. We created the interactive installation, The Library of Imagined Memories where
participants provoked their imaginations and resurrected their memories through donning creativity jackets and magic spectacles,
painting secret images that only they could see, recording memories with a crystal ball of the past and making a time capsule out of an abandoned book for the library collection. We investigated the creative act of imagining and remembering.

Mocca Festival and Future Ink Show in Brooklyn June 2009!

!NEW COMIC!

The Early Tremors of Rody Plane is being published as part of Jon Brodsky's curated book, The Flying Destructicate which is produced by the incredible book collective Encyclopedia Destructica.

The book is being released January 31st at the Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh. You can order copies here.

!NEW COMIC!

I made a one page comic for the magazine, "Magazine" of the Wham City collective from Baltimore...

This comic is a preview of the upcoming performance installation, "Tomb and The Merging of the Deathless," that I am working on with Director Kathleen Amshoff.

I'm not sure when it is being published, but I will give heads up when it is!