After a five-year hiatus from the major festivals they produced between 2014 and 2019, ILLUMINUS kicked off their first in a series of neighborhood-specific activations in a former Dorchester tire shop.
The Boston-based arts organization facilitates the creation of experiential, tech-enabled visual art projects by pairing artists new to the medium with mentors and experts in the field. Through the year-long planning process, artists created site-specific installations that allowed their reimagined work to be experienced in an immersive environment. Holding collaboration as a key tenet, ILLUMINUS invited community members to weigh in on the project during the process. “We plan to follow the same process for every neighborhood in Boston,” wrote ILLUMINUS experience director Diane Dwyer via email.
Both nights of the activation unfolded in the stripped-down interior of the former Dorchester Tire Service on October 18 and 19. The site temporarily became a playground for four Dorchester artists—Azia Carle, PeeJay Clarke, Sam Lê Shave, and Makeda Wallace—to traverse cultural and generational expanses. “We intentionally [didn’t] pose any prompts or themes,” wrote Dwyer. There was nonetheless a seamlessness to the activation that didn’t diminish the individuality of its parts.
The first work on display was visual and mixed-media artist Azia Carle’s meditation on sense and memory. In her installation, B. Dot, a ring of banners surrounded a group of tables that had a bushel of incense on every surface. Projected onto the banners were videos of a sunset, a body of water, and the Boston skyline and images of Muhammad Ali, paper hands, and a street corner. Each incense bushel rested on a cartoon corresponding to its odor. Citrus was the sun, lemon was leaves, and the odor of fresh pine needles was a teddy bear. In the center of it all squatted a table with Carle’s personal scent, B. Dot, sitting on its surface like a prayer candle. It smelled as sweet and as bitter as an orchid or a rose. I couldn’t nail down exactly what it was, but in the process of trying I was taken through a carousel of my own memories. What Carle expertly conveyed through this installation was the Proustian ideal of memory as communion with the self, and the magic was in how she managed to ritualize that process.
This work was nicely complimented by cross-disciplinary artist Sam Lê Shave’s adjacent sprawl of personal history titled Love Fatality and Confidence: Reclaiming our pain, what it means to cultivate love. Lê Shave’s installation was two rooms of works that spanned a variety of mediums. One room consisted of life-sized mannequins made out of rice paper and cultural ephemera, alongside walls constructed from Vietnamese breeze blocks and inscribed with affirmations written by Dorchester residents. In the other room were two more mannequins, this time made from sewn fabrics, and another intricate wall which hung beside sheets of transparent fabric painted and embroidered with different designs. On one sheet, Lê Shave inscribed the message “When I breathe in I pause time. When I exhale I give time back to me,” typifying her celebration of living as an act of generosity to ourselves. The sheets were occasionally lit by projections of the artist’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, which created a sort of double exposure where past and present were allowed to coexist. The most effective combination involved a sheet displaying an abstract painting of a woman dressed in trousers and a tunic. While images of Lê Shave’s family dissolved into one another, the woman remained a constant, like a musical cue with distinct variations. She functioned as an adhesive between the photos, as if to say that differences in person, place, and time were negligible, and that all these women were in fact one and the same.
Multidisciplinary artist and educator PeeJay Clarke similarly evoked the communal in his untitled creation of a fictional world that doubled as a cultural pastiche. On paper, Clarke’s world was an extensively detailed mishmash of greens and blues effaced by longitudinal lines. But when magnified through projection, we got an inkling of the immensity of Clarke’s imaginary world. The projections followed lines that vaulted spatial and cultural distances, in one instance bridging a Mesoamerican pyramid to an Afrofuturist structure. Clarke, a Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, knows the power the fantastical has to foster human connection. Much of that potential was realized with the inclusion of cardboard swords, shields, and regalia that visitors took pleasure in constructing so they, too, could partake in Clarke’s narrative.
Whereas Clarke’s installation encouraged connectivity through imagination, movement artist Makeda Wallace’s immersive dance experience, In-Tuned, centered the body. Wallace’s creation consisted of a circular texture projected onto a reserved plot of concrete. The projection itself was a viscous and turbulent design that reacted to the dancer’s movements like ripples in a body of water. I’m sorry to report I was unable to witness Wallace’s full performance during the Saturday night activation—a performance that was said to have illuminated the ripple effect our story can have on others.
Elsewhere in the space, The Dorchester Time Machine, created in collaboration with Artists for Humanity. The time machine was a video projection that switched between a past, present, and future incarnation of Dorchester in ten-minute intervals. Each era was depicted through collage—the past was a triptych of farms, villages, and harbors; the present was a collision of cars and trains; and the future was a sci-fi cityscape inhabited by robots and spacecraft. Yet despite the changes in landscape, each version was indelibly Dorchester, which attests to the ethos of ILLUMINUS as well as the organization’s future.
