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Terry Flaxton & Shawn Bell
We two have worked together on a series of projects with myself creating the images and Shawn creating the soundscapes and musical compositions. Below are the different series of works we've created. |
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Anthropocene is a 5 part work which is a collaboration between Terry Flaxton and Composer Shawn Bell (Montreal). Anthropocene is concerned with the world before humans inhabited it and after humans have left the face of the Earth. This work speaks about the human species via our absence and raises questions about our presence.
The intention behind Atnhrpocene is to create a wrap around dance performance for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which from our point of view encodes the nature of the Anthropocene itself. Stravinsky's storyline concerns those base instincts that supposedly power and empower our relationship to the earth - and in so doing they also encode some very old assumptions that humans have in being in the world - in short that we have the right to exploit it from a transactional stance. In Stravinsky's story a young virgin is asked to dance herself to death - to sacrifice herself for the tribe. The dance work surrounding Stravinsky's legendary piece is there to challenge these basic assumptions which have brought us to the brink of ecocide - in fact had we stewarded the planet correctly, it would have come to its own end.
Carl Jung once expressed the idea whilst on a safari to the Rift Valley in Africa and watching a million creatures going about their business of living, surviving and dying, that without him, the conscious observer, the scene would still continue - yet, by witnessing it as a conscious sentient creature he himself, as an ambassador of the universe itself, gave the scene meaning and significance and therefore, he concluded, where the gaze of a sentient but self-conscious creature alights, meaning is imbued. Of course this does not in itself create an order of value for various creatures - but it does speak about the special responsibility the self conscious creature has.
The Earth was born 14.5 billion years after the birth of the universe and it will die some 21 billion years after that date. In creating Anthropocene Flaxton and Bell are trying to create a vision of a world which no sentient consciousness has yet seen, or in the case of Consumed by the Sun, after we have left it (yet it has been imagined). The creative artwork itself is replete with meaning and significance as it is created by sentient creatures trying to imagine a reality that must have actually existed, but only in their absence.
Note these images and sounds are to be porojected onto the floor beneath the dancers and on the backcloth behind the dancers. The dancers themselves will wear image receiving clothes where we will place different images to the backdrop such that the dancers themselves will perform elemental gestures with regard each of the 5 parts of the work. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/collection/anthropocene
The intention behind Atnhrpocene is to create a wrap around dance performance for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which from our point of view encodes the nature of the Anthropocene itself. Stravinsky's storyline concerns those base instincts that supposedly power and empower our relationship to the earth - and in so doing they also encode some very old assumptions that humans have in being in the world - in short that we have the right to exploit it from a transactional stance. In Stravinsky's story a young virgin is asked to dance herself to death - to sacrifice herself for the tribe. The dance work surrounding Stravinsky's legendary piece is there to challenge these basic assumptions which have brought us to the brink of ecocide - in fact had we stewarded the planet correctly, it would have come to its own end.
Carl Jung once expressed the idea whilst on a safari to the Rift Valley in Africa and watching a million creatures going about their business of living, surviving and dying, that without him, the conscious observer, the scene would still continue - yet, by witnessing it as a conscious sentient creature he himself, as an ambassador of the universe itself, gave the scene meaning and significance and therefore, he concluded, where the gaze of a sentient but self-conscious creature alights, meaning is imbued. Of course this does not in itself create an order of value for various creatures - but it does speak about the special responsibility the self conscious creature has.
The Earth was born 14.5 billion years after the birth of the universe and it will die some 21 billion years after that date. In creating Anthropocene Flaxton and Bell are trying to create a vision of a world which no sentient consciousness has yet seen, or in the case of Consumed by the Sun, after we have left it (yet it has been imagined). The creative artwork itself is replete with meaning and significance as it is created by sentient creatures trying to imagine a reality that must have actually existed, but only in their absence.
Note these images and sounds are to be porojected onto the floor beneath the dancers and on the backcloth behind the dancers. The dancers themselves will wear image receiving clothes where we will place different images to the backdrop such that the dancers themselves will perform elemental gestures with regard each of the 5 parts of the work. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/collection/anthropocene
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ANTHROPOCENE: WORLDS
When the solar system is formed by relentless gravitational forces and this speaks about how there is a tendency to order in the universe, before the tendency to destruction is unleashed. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/worlds |
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ANTHROPOCENE: MOUNTAIN THUNDERSTORM
Once the earth has been formed via the centrifugal forces of the Solar System, Once the earth has cooled down sufficient for rocks and seas to have formed, weather has always been a feature of the earths coming into being and will also be part of its destruction – so it was present as the earth formed between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago and this work celebrates the life of the earth before creatures appeared. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/mountain-thunderstorm |
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ANTHROPOCENE: GLADE
Between 4 billion years ago and half a billion years ago single and multi celled animals flourished in the realm of the elements - but when the earth was sufficiently stable to manifest the advent of plant life some 500 million years ago, and also flowers 130 million years ago, then the simple creatures then mutated into the insects and small animals we know today. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/glade |
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ANTHROPOCENE: BORDERLESS
After our presence on the Earth has shattered its eco-system and the glaciers begin to melt, then cities will adapt and people will have to live in higher and higher buildings before they finally decide to leave the planet which now covered with water, has no useful high ground because global warming will have destroyed its life preserving character - then there will be no false human borders imposed on the planet. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/borderless-1 |
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ANTHROPOCENE: CONSUMED BY THE SUN
One billion years from now the sun's atmosphere will have expanded until it is so close to the earth that all the water evaporates revealing the deserts beneath all the seas and oceans. Much later when the suns body expands towards Earth's orbit some 7 billion years from now it will finally consume the contents of the Earth. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/consumed-by-the-sun |
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PROLOGUE TO ANTHROPOCENE
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THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ANGELS
The Consciousness of Angels is the first work of the Immeasurable Heaven collection and is a collaboration between Terry Flaxton and composer Shawn Bell. This work asks of the viewer to beleieve that larger, more influential (and yet more Immaterial Beings) than us exist - normally known as angels - Are they like those depicted in Renaissance art? Blond men, women and children with halos that hover near the mortals they whisper secrets to? Or are these just the reflection of our own knowledge that movements of early minute strings of energy that we now see as sub atomic particles, so simple and so early in the birth of the universe that were both entangled and communicating with eachother in an intelligent fashion, that then laid the foundations of the universe as we know it? And perhaps in recognising this we recognise their agency within the myths we construct? This work is a visualisation of the earliest foundational moments of our current universe. Available to purchase here: www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton/the-consciousness-of-angels |
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