I’ve held on to all kinds of things that hold meaning for me – video tapes of old TV shows I produced when I lived in New York, film prints of movies I’ve made, my favorite platform shoes, Levi’s from 1974, record albums, posters, old headshots. Increasingly, holding on to those things has become a burden. How do I let that stuff go – those memories, those ideas of my past?
Labyrinth Installation
During the last couple of years I’ve been working on a series of autobiographical video essays and installations structured on the Catholic Church’s Seven Holy Sacraments. Late last spring just as I began to focus on Communion the idea came to me – I could take artifacts from my past and form them into a kind of offering - an offering that honors my past in a way that offers others a space to reflect and a way to engage in honoring their own memories and histories.
Communion: The Labyrinth Project is my offering. While the material of the labyrinth issues from my life, my hope is that those who walk this labyrinth will spiral through their own lives, that each person considers the artifacts of his or her own past no mater how seemingly mundane with a kind of sacred intention to embrace the past, to let it go, to make way, less encumbered, for new meaning and fresh experiences.
In preparing for this installation I made a labyrinth each day for 40 days. A prayer flag for each day hangs overhead in entrance to the Black Box. During those 40 days I also made a few contemplative short videos. Those are screening in the curtained vestibule before the entrance to the labyrinth. There are no tricks to walking a labyrinth. It is not a maze, there is only one path, and you cannot get lost. Consider forming an intention, a question, a wish, or a prayer before you enter the labyrinth. And then think of the walk in three stages:
Release/let go ~ as you enter;
Receive/illumination ~ at the center;
Return/union ~ follow the same path out.
