Okay, I exaggerate slightly! But there were enough Yoko masks around to make it feel as if she had appeared at the Arts Center of the Capital Region for the Text as Art opening reception, thanks to the lovely folks of Air Talk, who were presenting a Yoko instruction piece. Not just any instruction piece either: they had a brand new piece, “ON LINE? It’s a map of your brain” that Yoko had given them thanks to the weekly Q&A she runs on Facebook and Twitter. Wow! The Yoko exhibit goes on at the Tang until May, and there’s a big celebration, “We’re All Water: An Homage to Yoko Ono” on April 18th that I plan to attend.
Curator Nancy Klepsch put together an interesting variety of artists who examined the ways text could embody art often in melancholy ways., but somehow Yoko’s presence helped buoy the celebration and we all enjoyed turning the instruction painting into another instruction piece, “Painting to be Walked On.”
The installation Corvus Illium by the collective forceperunit was an easy sell to me: crows! They had a book to collect people thoughts about crows so I wrote about the way they roost outside my office in the autumn.
I enjoyed drawing and then walking on the Yoko piece, chatting with other folks and then talking a little bit about 5¢ per Word, which I was happy to find a big hit with people. One of the things I learned from Yoko’s art: even serious subjects have something whimsical you can find to deflate their enormity and people like to interact with art! Some pictures:
K. A. Laity 