Preliminary sketch for Digestion, a performance and installation piece opening on Friday, September 16th at Future Tenant Gallery, Downtown Pittsburgh (as part of the group exhibition Your Place at the Banquet).
I’ve constructed a structure of wood, pipes, tubes, and found objects. The assemblage is both body and ecosystem. I will begin the “digestive process” as a live performance at 6:15 PM on opening night.
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Lately fossil fuel advertisements have been bombarding Western Pennsylvanians with “real” stories of people and families whose lives have changed for the better after dealing with the industry. Whether the subjects “sold the farm” to drillers (and bought dream condos), or can now afford to retire in style (after leasing their land), what we get is a glazed-over momentary snapshot produced by corporate image-makers. What we don’t see is the long-term picture revealing contamination of drinking water supplies, destruction of ecosystems, and health issues related to exposure to toxic substances. These negative effects creep up slowly after the windfall and the photo moments are long past. Smiling corporate execs (or actors playing them) warmly assure us of the benefits of using the resources under our feet. We don’t see them discussing the amount of environmental damage (and compensation) that they are willing to take on. Throughout history, corporations have taken whatever they can get, unless people rally to stop them.
In the neighboring states of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, visual artists have come together to consider the ways in which hasty actions can have disastrous effects on our ecosystems. In organizing, Reflections: Homage to Dunkard Creek, West Virginia artist Ann Payne was compelled to take a look at the big picture. Dunkard Creek experienced a total fish kill in 2009. Water from the creek eventually makes it way to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, a water supply for thousands.
In Reflections, artists from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and beyond were asked to remember the ecosystem of Dunkard Creek by creating renderings of the lost species. The traveling display of over 90 works (watercolors, oils, etc.) opens September 9th at an art gallery in Morgantown, West Virginia. The show is also scheduled to travel. I hope it will generate awareness and positive action. The long-term health of our country depends on it!
The piece above is my entry in the show, the freshwater drum.
For more info, please check out the project website:
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Please check out this exciting project that I am involved in at Future Tenant Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA.
Illustrations are by David Pohl.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Peace, Co-Executive Director
Your Place at the Banquet
September 16 – October 15, 2011
Opening Reception: September 16 6-9pm
Future Tenant / 819 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Your Place at the Banquet is a visual art exhibition and public awareness initiative that critically examines the mechanisms of our industrialized food system and aims to empower people to sow the seeds of change through their daily choices and actions.
A central exhibition hub will be open to the public from September 16 – October 15, 2011 at Future Tenant in Downtown Pittsburgh. From this central hub, bike-powered mobile programming, a poster campaign, street interviews, and public performances will travel beyond the gallery walls to extend the social impact throughout the Greater Pittsburgh region.
The exhibition features new works by Rose Clancy, H.E.A.P. HQ (Kevin Clancy, Dan Mooradian, Ali Reid), David Pohl, Tom Sarver, and Zayde Buti that seek to generate public awareness, critical discussion, and collective action around issues of food politics.
Rose Clancy will contribute Local Soup, a multifaceted work that includes the serving of homemade soups during the opening reception, a sculptural banquet table, and a series of video conversations with gardeners about their sustainable methods and practices. David Pohl will illustrate a series of posters that draw public awareness to key issues, such as industrial food, safe drinking water, genetically modified organisms, and seed saving. These posters will be printed and distributed widely throughout the city. Tom Sarver will perform Digestion at the opening, a piece that comments on the unnatural qualities of processed foods and the cravings that we develop for them. H.E.A.P. HQ will construct distinct bike-powered mobile units that will travel around the city, bringing transient platforms of exchange directly to the public and returning to the exhibition space to park during gallery hours. Zayde Buti will include a collection of his parodic music videos and perform his live one-man show Hungry.
Your Place at the Banquet is made possible by a grant from The Heinz Endowments Small Arts Initiative. The Heinz Endowments supports efforts to make southwestern Pennsylvania a premier place to live and work, a center for learning and educational excellence, and a region that embraces diversity and inclusion.
Future Tenant is a non-profit art space located in downtown Pittsburgh at 819 Penn Avenue dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging artists through exhibitions that offer a cutting edge perspective on the Pittsburgh art scene.
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I’ve drifted away from the blog a bit. Here are some doodles that I drew on the wall this week for a Downtown Pittsburgh event. The wall is 9′ x 24′ and the subject is the new industrialization of Pennsylvania wilderness areas resulting from the boom of deep shale drilling.
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For Immediate Release!
BREAD and PUPPET THEATER to perform at The Brew House
Bread & Puppet Theater presents The Decapitalization Cabaret
Where: Brew House Space 101 Gallery, 2100 Mary Street, Pittsburgh PA 15203
When: Saturday, April 23rd, 7:00 PM
How Much: “Pay what you wish.”
Puppets are on a roll in Pittsburgh this year. Two shows in as many months! On Saturday, April 23rd, internationally-recognized puppetry activists Bread & Puppet Theater (Glover, Vermont) will be making a stop on their Mid-Atlantic tour on the South Side for a show at the newly re-opened Brew House Space 101 Gallery. This latest edition of Bread & Puppet Theater’s cabaret series features the Kaspars’ interpretation of justice, an operatic argument about farms vs. jails, instructions on how to nab that alien, the can cans (and can’t can’ts) of universal health care, and much more. The Decapitalization Orchestra will provide soothing sounds for winter weary nerves.
Several organizations including the Brew House, ArtUp, Puppet Happening, Schmutz Co. and “Joy Toujours & The Toys Du Jours” partnered to make this show possible. The event will be open seating and “pay what you wish.” The troupe will pass a hat at the end of the cabaret.
As with all Bread & Puppet shows, a “Cheap Art” sale will follow the performance. This is a rare chance to pick up memorabilia, puppet how-to booklets and hand-pulled prints.
Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet Theater is an internationally renowned company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Its shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Puppetry Organization Offers “Open House Cabaret” at the Glass Lofts March 17th and 19th
Pittsburgh, PA – March 6, 2011 – For a city that has been missing an arts organization dedicated to puppetry performance for more than two years, good news is on the way. The Puppet Happening, a nascent collaboration featuring past organizers of the Black Sheep Puppet Festival, is rolling out plans to bring puppets to the city not just at an annual Fall festival, but all year long. As the new company is shaped, the organizers are staging two performances of local puppeteers to reconnect with the city’s diaspora of puppet artists and fans. The two cabaret evenings will feature work from organizers Tom Sarver, Flora Shepherd, and Mike Cuccaro, along with Pittsburgh newcomer and recent UConn Puppetry Arts graduate Zach Dorn. The performance dates are: Thursday, March 17 and Saturday, March 19 at 8pm at the Glass Lofts (2nd Floor Retail Space, 5485 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15206). The performances are geared for a mature audience. Suggested donation is $10 but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Thanks to our community partner, Friendship Development Associates.
Long-time puppetry performer and organizer Tom Sarver (who will also serve as Puppet Happening’s Executive and Artistic Director) will perform Punchinello vs. the Schmoovaggios, a semi-traditional “Punch” hand-puppet show where the rascally and violence-prone Punchinello takes on his high-class neighbors in a fight to the death. Lewd and rude, Punchinello gains and loses body parts as he tangles with angry shih tzus, combative conductors, amorous ladies, and… unicorns?
New Orleans-native and lifelong puppeteer Flora Shepherd brings us In the Night, a one-woman puppet show. This dark, adult fairy tale features magic, hidden secrets, and a red accordion. A young girl is called forth to save one she loves from deep inside the forest. But first she must navigate menacing abstract shapes, unfamiliar sounds, and her own fears. Her journey is brought to life through a combination of string, table-top, hand, and rod puppetry techniques. Will she escape from the forest? or will its shadowy figures absorb her into their dark unknown?
Puppeteer Zach Dorn makes his Pittsburgh debut with Real Live Puppets! A collection of short puppet performances that employ the fashionable Victorian tradition of Toy Theater. Armed with paper dolls, a VCR, and a miniature stage, Dorn plans to entertain guests in attendance. Following the toy theater performance, Dorn will project moving, intricate paper cut-outs onto the wall of the loft space with overhead projectors from local Pittsburgh Elementary schools. Guests are encouraged to bring a pair of their finest field glasses in order to inspect the hand crafted quality of the moving objects in this theater of miniature.
While the Puppet Happening plans to make the October 13-15 festival (location tba soon) the official “launch” of the organization, there will be several more opportunities to showcase puppetry throughout the city before then. Keep an eye on puppethappening.com or search “Puppet Happening” on Facebook for updates. For press graphics, please visit: http://puppethappening.com/press.php
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Along with fellow puppeteers Mike Cuccaro and Flora Shepherd, I have begun developing a new Pittsburgh Puppet Festival. Puppet Happening is the name. We aim to establish a city-wide presence and to produce events throughout the year. With an intense amount of start-up activity, I have had little time for blogging.
Our promotional activities begin tomorrow night (March 4th, 2011) at the Unblurred first Friday gallery crawl in the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We are occupying a studio at the Glass Lofts through March 19th and will have an open house at the Unblurred, followed by cabaret shows on March 17th and 19th. Check out our new web page for details.
Our temporary home at the Glass Lofts, Pittsburgh.
Puppet Happening crew.
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This footage of the 20o8 Art Olympic Theatre event at the Union Project was recorded by Pittsburgh filmmaker Keith Tassick. For this event, a Philadelphia team drove in to challenge two Pittsburgh teams. Check out the pre-event interviews!
This was my studio at the Brew House, a non-profit artist co-op located on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Below are some photographs of the space from 2003 – 2005. I was creating puppet shows, paintings, drawings and lots of kinetic sculpture at the time. To get to the studio, I had to take an old freight or passenger elevator. (depending on which one was working) The window looked out on a dilapidated wall of rusty pipes in a corridor of the 1890 brewery building. To visitors, I probably seemed like the Sebastian character from Blade Runner, living in an old industrial structure with a bunch of puppets!
This was the “kitchen” area.
Puppets and props.
Below, the spice rack. The yellowed paper on the wall was a list of
Duquesne Brewery employees that I discovered in the room.
My puppet group completed the show Perseus, Medusa and the Magic Frisbee in the space. The hour-long production involving ten puppeteers, four voice actors, two musicians and twenty puppets was featured at the Black Sheep Puppet Festival in 2003.
I constantly thought the place was haunted.
Well, I’m back to blogging after a long holiday break. I finally got around to condensing my Fishing Report documentary from 2009 into a ten-minute sample. The full version is about 40 minutes long. I cut out a lot of the scenic footage, and chopped the interviews down to give a basic idea of what the piece is about.
For those who are unaware of the project, the Fishing Report is a project that combines my interests of fishing and art into a documentary that explores the creative side – traditions, craft, rituals, etc. – of fishing. The piece was screened at Sarver’s Bait and Tackle, a storefront installation featured at the 2009 Three Rivers Arts Festival in Downtown Pittsburgh. The project was also supported by the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Mattress Factory. I shot a lot of the video myself, but also had assistance from Jeremiah Johnson, Rose Clancy and Mike Cuccaro.
Tom Sarver 
