Susan Alta Martin | October 1-14, 202

During her time at Lamplight, Susan Alta Martin will, over two weeks, transform Lamplight into a stage for a durational performance that uses the idea of a waiting room as a metaphor for the current power structure. With the help of local artists, we will transform the space and shift the metaphor so that the locus of power is the community.

Susan’s Community Events:

October 1-6, 11am-7pm,
“Waiting,”
walk by and watch us wait!
The front window of the residency space will become the stage and inside artists will be “waiting.”

October 3rd, 5pm-8pm,
“The Funeral,”
Featuring Performances and a Parade
The evening will kick off with a toy theater performance by Stacey Davidson. That will be followed by a eulogy led by Anna Helgeson where people will have a chance to mourn what they feel has been lost during this unprecedented time of attack on social justice issues. Finally, there will be a parade around Haywood Road led by Nancy Asch and Beth Heinberg in support of the long history of social justice causes and the root values that we carry forward.

October 6-9, 11am-7pm,
“Transformation,”
walk by and watch us transform the waiting room
The space will again become a sort of stage and people can come by and watch as Tom Ashcraft and Susan will lead the transformation of the space from a waiting room to an art installation. Area artists will also be bringing in things they have transformed from broken objects.

October 10th, 5-8pm,
“Transform, Not Fix,”

For the second intermission, the public is invited to an opening reception for the art exhibition “Transform, Not Fix.” Based on the idea that the system is too broken to fix, we need to make something new out of what we have.

October 11-13th, 11am-7pm,
“Community,”
A workshop where you can bring your broken objects to the space and the artists will help you transform them!

Other collaborators include:
Dawn Roe, Jeannie Regan, Ursula Gullow. Kirsten Stolle, Nava Lubelski, Kate Chassner, Frances Bukovsky, Nora Hartlaub, Erik Mace, Staj Noell, Lynne Hudson, and more.

Artist Statement:

I am a photo-based artist. I work most often in three dimensions, making sculptures out of photographs. I am interested in how socio-economics and power are constructed and how they appear in the landscape (in the expanded sense). Photography’s connection to reality allows me to show those constructions through analogy. I take photographs and form them in ways that reveal the constructed nature of what has been normalized by the powerful. I recently made a miniature waiting room for the Mall R.A.T.S. prompt “Where do we come together?” In doing research for the piece I came across the quote, from the sociologist, Helmut Huff. He wrote: “To wait for someone for prolonged periods is to physically experience their importance through scarcity of access.” It struck me that this is how I feel most of the time – as if I am waiting, waiting for the next horrific news to drop. Recent events have brought issues of governmental power to the foreground and all kinds of crazy ideas have been normalized. I want to use the waiting room as a metaphor for our current power structure but the miniature wouldn’t hold what I wanted to say so for the Lamplight residency and I am changing scale. I am making a full-scale stage set of a waiting room where I — with the help of some local artists — will act out waiting and then transform the metaphor.