Daniel Callis

This project is a multi-artist collaboration producing a series of art works in an interpretive response to the choral music of American composer, Morten Lauridsen. Specifically addressing his song cycle, Les Chansons des Roses. This set of songs are Lauridsen’s interpretive response to a set of poems by the 20th century German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Project participants are Tim Timmerman, artist and art faculty at George Fox University, Newberg, OR, and Nathan Huff, artist and art faculty at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA., and Daniel Callis, artist and art faculty at Biola University, La Mirada, CA.

 Documented here are six large-scale mixed media paintings on paper, measuring 60”x120” have be produced. These works were developed by a cyclical production process rotating the works amongst the three participants in two-month periods.  Each artist adds to the work on two occasions, responding in a generative visual exchange. These works were staged in conjunction with the coral performance of Lauridsen’s Les Chansons des Roses, performed by the George Fox University Choir at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon.

Concept

We are producing a body of work that is visual, auditory, and text-based and which explores the potentials and limitations of working across different modes of expression. Specifically, a poet, sculptor, and painter are attempting to make work that, in conversation, explores the potentials and limitations of meaning making. Intrinsic to the project is the role perception plays in communication and game playing. Perception operates in three ways: How the artists perceived the initiating set of words, which launched the project; how the artists respond to the responses to those words (what they perceived in that first set of actions as being worth responding to); and how an audience might potentially participate in the project in whole or in part: as something between the makers or something open to them. Because the gallery is a public space, the audience is inevitably invited to listen in on, and participate in, the conversation.

Each response—both among the artists and the audience—is an act of interpretation, which in turn comes from an act of commitment: We are, in working out this project over a number of months, committing to each other, to the work itself, and to those with whom we will eventually share it.

Process

Dan Callis was approached by a curator based in Groningen, Holland, to show work in a collaborative vein. This provided the impetus for this project, and led to an invitation to artist J.R. Uretsky and poet CM Davidson to work with Callis. In January 2012, the three artists spent a day in New York conversing about what shape the project might take. After several hours together, they decided to formulate a list of ten to twelve words and phrases that would guide the initial pieces. The list included hope, joy, vaudevillian, negotiate, fear, and found out, among others. After completing and mailing to each other the first set of objects, the artists agreed to speak to each other only through the work itself. So, a video might respond to a set of poems, and a sound collage might respond to a painting. And so on.

One of the aims of the project is to make an artifact (i.e., an installation of artifacts) that has some measure of cohesion and elegance. Since the process itself is a kind of mess, a game where the rules are made up as it’s being played, included in the eventual installation will be the slag heap (e.g., drafts, notes, failed experiments, etc.) out of which the stuff was made, underscoring how expression always emerges from larger forces and processes. Also on display will be the negotiation between the artists responding to each others’ work (as we try to figure out what the proper ‘thing to say’ next might be), and among the artists choosing what goes into the end project—i.e., the installation. What counts as “cohesion and elegance” will evolve as the installation travels to new contexts.