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MY Project Purple

11/8/2014

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My Project Purple: An Extravaganza

By: Jessica Tatara 

This Project is titled "Project Purple". Ever heard of the Wizard of Oz? Ever heard of Prince? 

Ever read Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes? Can water bring back your memory? Can magical instruments make the journey? My "Project Purple" splices and layers your techni-color World of Oz with the music and meaning from Purple Rain. This project aims to show new art embracing interracial artistry constructed by the forms of digital printmaking and sculpture in hopes to introduce a cultural convergence. 

Let the show begin: 44" x 31" digital print diptychs. 40” x 60” digital print. The images splice and layer the interpretation of lyrics from "Purple Rain" and screen shots and ideas from the motionpicture "The Wizard of Oz." Purple Rain Shoes displayed on a metallic pool. A rain wall made of silver 
streamers to walk through installed on the ceiling. You see the work through a "sky of purple" by wearing Purple Glasses under purple lenses. A clock with shades & tints of Purple instead of numerals with rules for each hour, as a symbol of peace to escape the crisis of time as well as to suggest the sky be recolored in your vision. I propose to offer the audience Purple Soda. The style will play with black visual culture, white visual culture, and surrealism to engage digital creation with race and gender formation. 

How did this appear? I wondered where to begin? When I arrived at the studio I wondered what tense am I in? Past? Present? Future? One artist told me present. I question the present... Do the images have depth or is it going to be shallow? Are there haloes or contentions and convictions embedded within the art? Where to start? Why not with memory? I remembered the artists back in the labs in Berkeley who "do dream-weave ideas," then I began to dream-weave too in the studio. This meant to begin a new project connecting the concepts between literature, film, and technology of digital arts and digital prints. I played with the present by connecting to the past times and inventing new times with thePurple Clock. The time periods are Hughes 1920, Oz 1939, Purple Rain 1984, Beloved 1987, Cixous 1997 and the technology PS6 of the present. I started thinking deeply about interpreting the ideas of visionaries and compositing art. Thinking of visionaries like Hitchcock, Neruda, Frank Oz, Barney, Alberti, Sir Isaac Newton, and 3D/Holographics. I thought in terms of hermeneutics and in terms of contemporary arts. Then I dreamt some more. I read the CAP seminar readings and began to dream of an installation in the Guggenheim. I wanted to invite the audience to experience deeper interpretations with 
known material like Oz and then New Genres like a waterfall wall and being delicately enraptured by the ephemeral feeling of being underwater, and thinking about walking in magical shoes with purple hours. Thinking like Morrisson as time was no longer a constraint but a rotation of purple hues. 

Remember the first time you ever used the color Purple from your crayon box? What did it mean? What do you remember about the Wizard of Oz or the feeling music brings to your dancing feet? Are the memories connected? ...Questions I pondered while making the art...  What contains memory and does water connect to memory in a visual metaphor?  I looked up Mapplethorpe who like Watteau and La Tour spun the underground culture from low brow to high brow into a King's Court. Bring digital Art, African American Lit, Formal Fine Art Rules and Street to a place of Prince/Prints & Goddess. I thought, be like the artist who connects worlds, introduce a Hollywood VIP underground style to the scholarly platform where DaVinci's rules are running with literature masters like Robert Haas, June Jordan and Lyn Hejinian on a contemporary heartbeat. Who else tries to 
connect more than one media? I began playing John Cameron Mitchell who composed a one man play and then created a New Line Cinema film "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" combining animation, rock & roll musical, Plato's Symposium/The Origin of Love, The Berlin Wall and Transgender formation. I found an artist to look-up to digitally, via Youtube, I have heroes and he is one. I dug through my journals, my papers, digital art pieces, and looked up artists across the country and wondered what isn'tconnected that is? In the Mission Hill lab, I played the Wizard of Oz, and the movie Purple Rain and began to question music, and colors like synesthesia. When you see a rainbow in the sky it is like a firmament and the realm of the anagoge could enter your peaceful world, as it could be true as an artist who finds 
hundreds of colors to play with and compose a symbol, an idea, a representation of another place, expression, mood, or experiment. I began to play with the rainbow. The sensitivity to music and layers of imagery from the source material- films, literature and PS tools are the prominent source of inspiration to make Project Purple. I played with ornamenting the feminine, and meaning of goddesses. Many hours were spent in Photoshop compositing the digital prints working on the goddess. The tools that made the images are pen tool, selections, layers, paths, "marching ants", brushes, paint buckets, filters, line tools, free transform, distortions, creating custom patterns and brushes, printing on the Epson 9900 in perceptual and exploring the internet for installation ideas. I listened to Purple rain for days on end and was profoundly struck by Prince in a live show of him and Michael Jackson, of him and James Brown and him with his guitar on Youtube. God knows I got turned on. Then I remembered again, being present for his live concert. Many years ago I waited for hours at the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd. to get a ticket for the Grammy-After-Party with the Artist formally known as Prince, Prince. I know what it's like at the ropes, the velvet ropes. I was there right next to Aerosmith. I was there when Babyface arrived, ask God. I got inside second row with Puff Daddy across the room from me, Macy Gray on stage. Then during a song with the NPG raving and exuding freaky dances in the crowd, Prince came close to the stage's edge and he made eye contact with me. It is electrifying. Truly radical. A radical intensity. I found this memory in a fraction of a second to raise a sense of enlightenment. I remembered one lesson from UCB was, 'just try to turn on one member of the audience, if you've done that you've succeeded'...I thought art has a magical switch, it could turn you on to thinking. It makes me happy seeing you and thinking about the art, again wondering are memories layers within lives? The work I make is woven with layers of artists 

in reality or not, by dream-weaving 100s of layers of colors, screening, masking, channeling and 

brushing while creating digital composites splicing literature of the greats, stars really, yet wondering 

how rainbows and memories and water in your world of Purple rock and roll?
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