Collaboration

When one thinks of artistic collaboration, Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus come to mind, and certainly the spirit of artistic collaboration is central to Glowing Heads. Collaborating creates new, unforeseen visions of the world. Glowing Heads projects begin with a summons to participate, sometimes local, sometimes global. Accepting the invitation is not to be taken lightly. Project participants are asked to complete artful tasks that ultimately will play a part in the final exhibition or performance. Collaborators might be asked to take photographs with recyclable cameras; write musings on paper strips; devise two-dimensional pieces; respond in prose, poetry, or phrases to color swatches or to photographs. Creative boundaries are viewed as an effective catalyst to imaginative productivity—time limit, space restraint, medium composition, size prescription, and so forth. Each project has an inherent degree of unpredictability that necessarily requires openness to the process and to the result by all participants. In spite of any attempt to predict an outcome, complications are bound to reshape certain details of the project. The influence on participants varies: one might experience an enhanced awareness of a color, spending a few weeks photographing a single hue; another might discover a personal story inspired by a photograph. No matter how isolated a participant's contribution might seem at the outset, when seen in concert with the work of others, the result is a surprising synthesis. Language fuses with film, sound, and music in a synchronous performance; a disparate group of phrases, brought together by design, becomes poetry; random images merge to become a tonal quilt. The effect is exhilarating, as participants recognize their contributions in the context of a fully realized and unified creation. The culmination of efforts is a staggering, stupendous roundup of collaged montages, installations, assemblages, sculptures, one-of-a-kind chairs, original books, art stamps, thematic blocks, object constellations, word displays, poetry sticks, photographs, slideshows, videos, recitations, and music. Even the food matches the mood.