Aching to Go Home

Aching to Go Home is a fully staged play I wrote that is based on the true story of my father’s defining experiences during the Second World War viewed through veils of hallucinatory dementia he suffered in the last chapter of his life. The writing and production of Aching to Go Home unfolded over a three-and-a-half-year period. The research involved travel to Israel, France, Belgium, Austria, and many parts of the United States and was an intensely personal experience.

More about Aching to Go Home here.

Forest Project

Forest Project is a site-specific installation of a temporary forest, created within Riverside Park, New York, during a two-week period in 1988/1989. The forest, made of 350 trees grown as Christmas trees and left over after the holiday, also served as a giant set for performances of movement and dance. Forest Project was co-created by Leda Franklin and Paul Solomon.

More about Forest Project, including a video, here.

Live in the Hive! 

Live in the Hive! is a city-wide installation and mega-event created collaboratively with etymologists, apiarists, sculptors, photographers, and videographers in Columbus, Ohio, in 1993. At the center of this happening was a human-scaled bee hive that served as a metaphor for the recently created internet. 

More about Live in the Hive! here.

Rubicon

Rubicon is a highly collaborative, site-specific performance work with outdoor sets that was filmed and viewed in a theatre. Three choreographers were central to the making of Rubicon: David Beadle, Julianne O’Brien, and Kristi Spessard. Filming took place in southern Ohio forests, and along the Olentangy River, in  Columbus, Ohio. The completed work was screened in Sullivant Theatre at The Ohio State University in 1994.

More about Rubicon here.

Reflecting on these, and other productions:

Working in theatre, film and video, and making site-specific installations is exceptionally rewarding for me and perhaps surprisingly, has a lot in common with my photographic work. Photographing is always performative. Once behind the camera, the photographer takes on different identities. Some of my photographic projects involve a team of people working together, as in theatre production and involve elements that are especially theatrical. The Jones Beach Project, for example, involved setting up a 144 square foot portable studio on one of the most crowded beaches anywhere in the world. My presence there, with two assistants during portions of three successive summers, created a public spectacle.

Making photographs for the Boundary of Eden series compelled me to spend a lot of time in relative isolation, in places that were often inhospitable. Making those photographs required moving my body as though I was on stage, with only trees and rocks as an audience. 

Photographic work, and projects like the Forest Project and Live in the Hive! gave me opportunities to collaborate with many other kinds of artists, and with non-artists. The Forest Project led my partner Leda Franklin and me to meet with and get to know Christmas tree farmers in rural parts of New York State. Among them, was feminist author Kate Millet who founded the Women’s Art Colony, which was financed by sales of Christmas trees grown there in Dutchess County, near Poughkeepsie, New York. Millet shared some of what she had learned about growing and selling Christmas trees with us when we visited her there. 

One of the first collaborative site-specific projects I got involved in was a street art project designed to make New Yorkers aware of the devastation caused by nuclear warfare. The project was part of international observances of Nagasaki Day, held on the anniversary of the annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Nagasaki, Japan, after a nuclear bomb was detonated there by the United States, on August 9, 1945.

A bunch of us spent a couple of days making templates using our bodies, that we used to paint silhouettes representing dead bodies, on the streets and sidewalks of the financial district on Lower Manhattan. We completed the work during a long night, on the eve of Nagasaki Day during the early 1980s. In this photograph, one of the World Trade Towers is visible.

Just before dawn, all of us were arrested for defacing public property. During the trial, the prosecutor detailed what we had done, and police officers described what they had observed. Our attorney talked about our motivations and mentioned that the paint we used was water based, and had washed away in the week or so after the action. After both sides had their say, the judge addressed us, the defendants, and said, “I just wish there were more people like you. Case dismissed!”