the journey
the story of collaboration and creation between chong, kershaw, and heeren
Chong met both Kershaw and Heeren through mutual friends and decided to combine the creative energies to create 'fractals' before she graduated.
Each artist came with their backgrounds, artistic and personal, and unique curiosities. What would happen if the artists came together and created alongside each other, letting their work speak for themselves and hold whatever they needed them to?
And so, Chong, Kershaw, and Heeren tried out simultaneous collaborative improvisation (henceforth SCI) one night in a study room at the Main Library at the University of Iowa.
From this first session, the artists realized something interesting: their work naturally carried projections of their present realities. As each artist pulled from the music being composed, the words being written on the walls, and the artwork being drawn, there rose a sense of unity.
The following are the pieces created from the first session.
Reflecting back on the session, the artists pulled forth the word 'surrender', which was captured most accurately by Kershaw's piece.
The artists found the SCI session rewarding and decided to add it as a part of the exhibition, during the evening.
They held another SCI session before the day of the exhibition, this time at the NEXUS office in the College of Engineering, which is a space encouraging collaboration between the sciences and the arts. In this space, Heeren had access to a deconstructed grand piano, which led to a different sound palate compared to the first SCI session.
Here is a video of the session.
All Videos
Here is what Kershaw created.
For this session, the artists discovered that the word 'movement' rose as a theme. It was interesting to see the difference between the sessions: from 'surrender' to 'movement', it truly reflected the shift in each artists' personal life as well as creative life.
After the second SCI session, the artists decided to add one more element to the exhibition: artifacts. They wanted something for the visitors to take away with them. Chong came up with the idea from Esperanza Spalding's album 'Exposure' where Spalding created an entire album on Facebook Live in 77 hours and sent out scraps of her notes and lyrics with the physical albums.
To make the artifacts, the artists used hot foil stamp pressing, courtesy of the NEXUS organization in the College of Engineering.
Here are samples of the artifacts:
And so, everything was set.
All that was left was the exhibition. Chong, Kershaw, and Heeren were ready to show the world pieces of their fractal minds and ready to invite an audience into an SCI session.
On April 17th, 2018 'fractals of identity' came to life at Public Space One in Iowa City.
Here, we have recreated its essence in digital form.
Welcome to 'fractals of identity'.
