Participatory Artwork
Ocean Calling invites you to speak your words of love, grief and remembrance into the wind and the waves of the Pacific Ocean in the unceded homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, which we now call San Francisco, California. Its specific location is where Ortega Street meets the sea at Sunset Dunes park (formerly the Great Highway). While the phone isn’t connected to a landline, you join an interconnected web of people who have made and received calls. The first threads were spun between Outer Sunset artists Jamae Tasker and Sarah McCarthy Grimm, who were both grieving younger siblings. Jamae’s younger brother died in June 2023 and Sarah’s younger sister disappeared in September 2023.
More information at: www.OceanCallingSF.com
Ocean Calling
Detained Imprints
Detained Imprints is a participatory performance that reclaims power over the experience of psycho-spiritual or physical detainment, an act of resilience and resistance. The foundational material is burlap, sourced from a traumatic experience Badri had with the morality police in Tehran in 2006 when a policeman threatened her by saying: " I am going to put you in the potato sack, toss you inside the trunk and take you to hell.” While she was able to escape that particular detainment, part of her spirit was detained that day. Sarah joins in solidarity with both her art sister Badri and her blood sister Chelsea, who disappeared in September 2023 from a rural road in Arizona.
After reciting a poem from within burlap confinement, they invite participants to write directly onto the burlap, transforming some of the grief into the artwork even as they imprint the names of those detained. The transgressive act of writing the names becomes an alchemical force for releasing knots that detain energy. Participants and artists alike rediscover parts of their spirit and memory that have been detained by trauma, freeing themselves through collaboration. Together, they’re able to channel a positive force that extends to everyone involved, bringing about greater understanding, empathy, and unity.
Collective Imprints
What is imprinted on our individual and collective psyches? What do we want to imprint for the future? What is within our power to adapt? Abstract art’s ability to prompt psychological and spiritual expansion towards collective healing is the foundational assumption behind Collective Imprints. I propose to instigate healthier social imprinting through a participatory process grounded in a hand-press mono print technique I have been developing since 2016.
Photograph by Max Hemphill at NeueHouse Venice Beach, October 2023