A Refreshing Night of Mixed Media

May 2009

It was an event that left the audience commenting about their dream-like states of mind. For an hour, words danced amidst sketches, repeating video and animation. Providing this refreshing break from the structured science of medical school, Autumn Watts presented collaborative multimedia works in her lecture entitled “Is It Dark Where You’re Sitting?” part of the April Literary Lecture Series at WCMC-Q.

Throughout her lecture, Watts described characters and stories that came to her and shared them with the audience. She also explained the process of working with other artists and how this can take artistic and literary expression to a new level.

“I’ve always been interested in crossing categories, exploding lines. But my abilities are limited; I’m not artistically or technically equipped to do all the things I want. Moreover, I believe that everyone—artists, scholars, or scientists—have a center of gravity, a place we’re drawn to. Left to my own devices, I will always drift toward a certain palette, a certain constellation of images and concerns,” Watts said.

During the lecture, Watts described several main projects from inception to completion and shared them with the audience. “Is It Dark Where You’re Sitting?” involved a sound- and light-proofed booth that she, Tara Cooper and Lindsey Glover worked on together as part of a Master of Fine Arts collaboration at Cornell University, New York.

“So partnering with other artists forces me to approach their center of gravity, and them to approach mine. It unlocks doors to new rooms in my head; it also takes away a certain amount of control,” Watts said.

Watts said she chose to work with Glover and Cooper for their nostalgia and haunting use of light, and the unsettling dark quality of their work, respectively. In collaborating with them, Watts’ own writing became something to experience rather than just read—in the booth they constructed, her writing would play on two different audio tracks that mingled together with a third track of ambient noise. She shared this experience with the audience.

“Once inside the booth, you would enter a completely dark, enclosed, and private space: the only light coming from the small projection flickering on the wall. It’s impossible to convey that experience, as it was very much a visceral as well as an auditory and visual one—but I’ve tried to create an approximation of it,” Watts explained.

Watt’s writings shuffled through the space as imagery, light and the confinement created a complete experience. Audience members watched black and white footage of owls and listened to fragments of conversations as they played alone and overlapped one another. The lecture hall took on a completely still quality as everyone absorbed the experience and waited for more.

Moving into another collaborative project entitled “Weather Permitting,” Watts explained the inspiration and collaborative process she was still in the middle of working on with Cooper.

Cooper initially proposed the concept to explore “the language of weather and the desire for the current conditions to take a turn for the better.” The idea of weather being ordinary and even boring yet obsessively repetitive frightened Watts, who noted that “Weather is this huge, immensely uncontrollable force. It’s one of the few things that humans have absolutely no impact on. It cannot be controlled or contained—but, in a limited way, it can be predicted, and described. Language is a form of containment. We can’t think outside language; we can’t perceive what cannot be described. But when reading the language of weather, I found that it described…nothing,” Watts said.

Their correspondence shaped the work divided into three parts—“rooms,” “instruments,” and “memory and the potential for disaster.” Quoting Cooper, Watts read: “excerpts citing weather conditions printed starkly with letterpress, are interrupted by small detailed etchings depicting an ordinary, even banal, shot taken within someone’s home. Within each shot there is evidence of a window with a view to what is occurring outside. Something is always highlighted in blue. Only the personal possessions are depicted in the room—the resident is absent.”

Watts proceeded to read a series of stories about various characters inspired by this concept, who occupied rooms that Cooper would then create—some sad, some funny, some audacious. One character, named Mildred, age 90, came to Watts’ mind, and she writes in part: “My body is younger than my mind. It will go on ticking, even when my mind is worn out. If you held my mind up to the light, you could see everything through it. All the shadows and trees. You can not know all the things I have seen.”

Through the characters and their longing and deepest sentiments, universal thoughts and feelings swept over the audience, causing laughter and contemplation.

The “Instruments” section of “Weather Permitting,” Watts explained, was still under construction. But she shared some images from Cooper. The “Memories and Potential for Disaster” section, on the other hand, has taken off and even expanded beyond Watts’ expectations. The section involves a series of collaged screen prints from disaster images in and around Ontario, created by Cooper, who describes that while the images are believable, inconsistencies in them “reveal the impossibility of the situation.” The element of human imagination and fear comes through—“there is the potential for disaster for tomorrow, coupled with the memory of past calamites.”

Responding to Cooper’s concept, “these images made me want to write a series of very short stories, in which weather was both the landscape and motivation for the character’s actions. I decided to title each of them after a direction: North, South, East, and Down,” Watts said.

Through her interaction with imagery provided by her collaborator, Watts’ stories grew much longer than expected and she was only able to share a portion of the story entitled “North.”

“Every morning the old man would wake from his nest of frost-stiffed blankets and revive the small driftwood fire inside his tent with handfuls of grass and dried curls of salty bark, stripped from the bent trees growing in the cliff’s narrow crevices,” Watts read from her work.

Moving into her last piece of the presentation, Watts described “Until The Lake Froze Solid,” a work that began with a phone conversation where Cooper discussed the ideas of “cracks in the normal, the disturbing under-layer, and the notion of rescue.” Watts used these notions to write a few pieces, which she sent back to Cooper. Through the exchange of preliminary drawings and narratives, a film produced by Cooper and her husband entitled “Until The Lake Froze Solid,” featuring Watts’ words and moving image and narration by Cooper, evolved.

“The ideas of enclosure, survival and hibernation, made me imagine an older woman living alone, wrestling with depression triggered by the death of a abusive husband, whose passing should have brought release. I wanted to explore the knots and contradictions of this complex relationship, continuing even past his death. I wanted to understand her complicated regret, sense of abandonment, self-blame and yet betrayal, and the looking away from unbearable secrets,” Watts explained of the writing process. “The ice here is thin, it overlays an immensity of cold, dark water, and there are cracks.”

The film ensued and the audience was again captivated by an escape into a secret world filled with—as is seemingly a trademark of Watts’ collaborative work—stunningly real sentiments.

Report by Emily Alp