Truitt & Truitt Exhibition, November/ December, Green Kill.
The November/December exhibion at Green Kill is TRUITT & TRUITT: “Dicte: A Triptych” & “26 Salvages.”
The November/December exhibition at Green Kill is TRUITT & TRUITT: “Dicte: A Triptych” & “26 Salvages.” The exhibition includes Kimber Truitt’s series of collage paintings entitled "26 Salvages" in the gallery; and Sam Truitt’s three-screen, audio-visual work "Dicte" in the White Room. “Truitt & Truitt” includes the screening of Sam Truitt’s AV series "state/shaft//shaft/state"; the Greenkill performance of "Landfall" (Fall 2021); and original, limited-edition, T&T posters for sale.
The opening party is Saturday, November 2, 5-7 PM The exhibition runs from Saturday, November 7 until Saturday, December 28, 2024. Exhibtion hours are Saturday and Sunday, 1-6 PM.
About “26 Savages”
The SALVAGES series is informed in part by how the Hudson and the Catskills (rivers and mountains) and New York (islands), through visual rhythms (body, tidal, trail, rail and road) and psyche, connect as landscape. Kimber writes: “I work in collage, among other media, including acrylic and charcoal, and the SALVAGES are collage paintings made of random trash: newsprint, journals, mail, wrappers, shopping bags, magazines, ticket stubs, receipts, photos and organic matter. We produce a lot of garbage, and collectively leave behind us a debris field of refuse. It is what we leave, like long ago the glaciers did, receding to reveal this place of mountains and aluvial plane. It is one measure of where we are, overlaid with trash. Like memory, what we leave behind washes up. I save/‘salvage’ what trace glows.”
About “Dicte”
DICTE: A TRIPTYCH transposes word-sets made from a year-long, daily interaction with 144-word blocks of a sequential, thematically loose-jointed text—sentences, stage directions and Morse Code (cipher)—into sounds, music, speech, recordings, symbols, images, photos, films, movies and whatever seemed to magnetize to what that day the words said (with some themes seeming to carry for some days as experience dictated) downloaded from the internet. Edited, recombined, spliced, diced (at times to the fabled 0.08 of a second) and overlaid with text, each day from 23. Nov. 2012 to 23. Nov. 13, a block (144 words) was returned onto the internet (youtube). (To note, the measure of 144 words was derived from the division of a text of 52,560 words by 365 days. The original transmissions totalled 6 hours and 22-minutes in length. The last transmission (365/365) was blocked and removed by youtube censors.) So while DICTE is a work of environmental art—made of sound/music, words/speech and moving/still images within an equidistant triangle of screen/sonic fields (and what unknown recombination may occur between them)—it is also a work of process art, which is the way Truitt would hope you may know this piece. The DICTE text is from Truitt's DICK: A Vertical Elegy (2013, Lunar Chandelier), a prose poem about JFK’s assassination, including the name of one of its potential plotters. That information, protected through a number of layers of cipher, is transmitted through the Morse Code passages, the seemingly undifferentiated plane of which is broken up with stage directions from Shakespeare’s tragedies. DICTE has been screened in the La Sala Cantina performance space in Williamsburg, NY (Nov. 2013); and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (Dec. 2014).
About “shaft/state//state/shaft”
For a calendar year in the early ‘00s, Sam Truitt wrote reports for a New York-based publisher of commercial real-estate research, statistics and analysis. The business lay a building west of 5th Avenue on the north side of 37th, and his writing group was located initially on the top floor. He composed the "state" strips standing smoking on the roof, just two blocks north of the Empire State Building, which from this 11th-floor vantage soared 92 stories into open sky. Then that spring his group moved to the fourth floor, removing easy rooftop access. He continued to smoke and extemporaneously compose through the day, yet now on a fire escape. He hung in the back (though also center) of near a dozen office structures amid their exposed innards and exhaustion (droning, drooling, steaming and belching)—a sunless canyon that also served as an airshaft. state/shaft shaft/state’s texts are direct transcriptions of what he said then into an Olympus W-10, an “ultracompact” (6.5 x 3.3 x 1.8 cm), digital voice recorder that allows you to take pictures synchronized to a sound recording (used to reference and organize speech visually). Importantly, you can pause the recording at any time (the “clicks” at the start and stop of each dictation); then, you press a button to take a picture. You can take as many as you want any session, restarting dictation, though once you hit stop it’s done or gone. Or you press “start” again. Each jittery strip is sound-to-images synced and saved as an AVI computer file. Their ordering here is atemporal and relatively arbitrary, switching between “state” and “shaft” (with less “states” than “shaft”).
About “Landfall'‘
Landfall is an hour-long enactment of a there-and-back poem of that name by Sam Truitt (text/voice) fused to the deep made immediate in Stephen Lewis and Mike Ratti (sound) as seen through Richard Kroehling (vision). Based on a round-trip 2013 oceanic excursion from Manhattan to Christiansted in the Virgin Islands and points between, Landfall shakes senses that chronicle what the eye cannot see or ears hear by way of what they do see, hear and sometimes feel: “…[A]s last light leaves the harbor with us following the Hudson Canyon out the New York Bight by way of Ambrose Horn into the darkness like an animal wrong biting back moans—that come to one disappearing—….” The question that seems to linger in the sound is where on Earth do we belong—and the answer is here.
About Sam Truitt
Born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan, Sam Truitt is the president of the non-profit Institute for Publishing Arts and the director of Station Hill Press. An award-winning poet in print, performance and digital arts, he is also a teacher, curator, festival-organizer, radio-show host and volunteer ambulance driver. He lives in Woodstock. For more visit: https://samtsong.com/about
About Kimber Truitt
Kimber Truitt was born in Dallas, Texas, and raised in Tampa and Atlanta. She graduated with an MFA from Hunter College in 2003 and currently lives in Woodstock, New York, where she teaches yoga and is on the steering committee of the Woodstock Community Festival of Awakening.