by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Juliet Wing said her art show at Factory on Fifth will be unlike anything most people have seen at standard galleries because the subject in the art will be present at the show, but not as a person mingling with the crowd. She'll be playing a character.
"Now Here, Nowhere" is about a character named Piper, played by Tara Khozein, who is searching for something.
There is something childish and absurd about Piper's search, Wing said, because she's not going to find what she's looking for. She also doesn't necessarily know what she's searching for.
The photographs and painting are of Piper, who will be there performing different activities around the gallery throughout the evening. All she does will prove unsuccessful. For example, there will be fans set up around the gallery, blowing inward. There will be plastic grocery bags blowing all over the floor. At some point, Piper will decide to pick them up, but when she tries, they will keep blowing around and escape her.
There are also found objects, like a rearview mirror, that allude to the theme of searching.
She said in regular art shows and museums there are signs reading "do not touch," but with her show, that rule does not apply.
"You can touch the photographs, the painting," she said. "You can't touch her but you can touch what she's been doing."
Wing said she hopes the regular art crowd won't be the only ones attending.
"I didn't want just people that consider themselves to be interested in art to come," Wing said. "I invited psychologists and psychology students. I invited religious groups. I invited Islamic associations."
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A number of things influenced the project. Working at a day care, she loved the metaphors she got from children's books, she said.
"I was reading the book Are You My Mommy," she said. "I was feeling this weird parallel to what I was doing."
She said she was influenced in part by the death of a friend.
"She was killed by her husband," she said. "It made me think about her life and about other girls and this thing that's missing in their life that makes them make bad choices."
She also likes to use theater in her art and make up stories. She said she discovered Khozein performing in a play in Santa Fe.
"Young people - usually when they act - they're not very sincere," she said. "The way she moved was so authentic, and she was so believable. She had this really mystical sense about her."
She said Piper will be in her own world. We can see her but she cannot see us. Wing compared it to when you look at somebody staring out the window.
"You go, 'Man, they're somewhere else,'" she said. "'I see them there, but they're somewhere else.'"
She said the food she's serving, watermelon and birthday cake, was also chosen to fit the show.
"Isn't everybody tired of crackers and cheese?" she said. "The reason I'm an artist is because I love honesty, and cheese and crackers is not honest to me. Watermelon and birthday cake - that's honest."
She's also an artist because she wants to benefit people, she said.
"An artist's job is to bring things to the surface to make people feel," she said. "People have a lot of similar experiences, and they're not really validated. Being an artist is probably the healthiest member of society you can be."
She said she doesn't believe people ever stop searching, though they may pretend to.
"There's a quote by Thoreau," she said. "It goes, 'All men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song still in them'. So everyone's desperate for something."
