Hired to record and illustrate my intent and focus of my "Every Painting Is A Story" cross-discipline creative collaborative initiative: Video by T2PTV (Ashley Love and Bruce Nairn)

See also: Creative Collaboration - Elaine Weiner-Reed's Every Painting is a Song Initiative (https://youtu.be/N4w_rIJeX-c ); 3:57 minutes

EVERY PAINTING IS A SONG | EVERY PAINTING IS A STORY

"How do my works SOUND to you? Tell me in word, song, music... in your own true voice."

In 2016 or before, visual artist Elaine Weiner-Reed began asking and wondering: "If my paintings and sculptures were music, how would they sound to you?"

From this, her cross-discipline collaboration initiative "Every Painting is a Song" was born, and over the years musicians and writers have begun to respond, intrigued with engaging creatively across the many arts. Many videos were created based on the songs, music, and poetry inspired by these artists works. This video is an overview of Weiner-Reed's initiative and a gateway to "imagining more!"

In 2018, Elaine and her artist friend, April M Rimpo, collaborated to mount a Summer 2019 two-person art show entitled "Portraits of Life: The Art of Storytelling" which led to a magical merging of creative minds "Every Painting is a Song | Every Painting is a Story." In May-June 2019, Slayton House's Bernice Kish Gallery served as multimedia-cross-discipline exhibition and performance stage.

Visual Artists Elaine Weiner-Reed and April M Rimpo are visual storytellers, exploring relationships, life, shape, and color in different ways to honor life’s journey and individuals they meet along the way. Both artists are inspired by music and musicians in different ways as interpreted in their different styles, but their visions align and converged around the idea of creative collaboration with other artistic disciplines. Believing in the positive energy created when Artists-Inspire-Artists, they took Weiner-Reed’s “Every Painting is a Song” collaboration initiative and expanded into “Every Painting is A Song/Every Painting is a Story” incorporating writers and musicians in two collaboration events at their exhibition: “Portraits of Life – The Art of Storytelling.”

In 2021, Elaine and April collaborated again in their exhibition: Portraits of Life: Once Upon a Story. Art took flight as it found alternative reflections in poetry and music. The professional poets will be honored in separate videos throughout 2022.

Elaine Weiner-Reed: https://www.elaineweinerreed.com/

Beau X. Bown (BXB) is an experienced video editor and producer with strong design skills. Based in the United States, Beau has worked on a variety of different commercial and creative projects to deliver innovative techniques in video editing, custom graphics, visual effects, and augmented reality experiences.

Beau was accepted to the Regent's University of London, Film and Global Theatre, program, and gained expertise in video editing, writing, directing on-screen talent, production planning, and set design. Beau returned to the U.S. to expand on-camera techniques at a Meisner-based film & acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City.

Beau graduated with honors, BA in History, and a Minor in Leadership and Management from Utah State University. Between courses, Beau led the collaboration with students with the Yale Film Department to create a low-budget documentary called “Monumental: The Bears Ears Story.” Additionally, Beau worked part-time at Dragonfli Media Technologies, as a freelance video editor for some of the world’s largest brands and enterprise clients.

After graduating from Utah State, Beau was selected to join a fellowship program, “Venture for America.” As an alumnus, Beau has edited promo videos, built brand identity, designed custom content for advertisements, and led marketing initiatives for established brands and start-ups.

Performers: Mandy Morrison, Samantha Siegel, Tiara Francis

As the American proclivity of success and achievement is partially defined by ‘having a roof over one’s head’, living apart from this norm, segregates those who have neither and casts them as ‘disposable’. Just as unwanted furniture and empty boxes are left in the street for garbage pick-up, those who are unable to participate in consumerist class norms are viewed as unclean and -in turn- unworthy outcasts; victims of their corporeal existence. Unable to benefit from or participate in the ‘disruptive’ digital age, they make shelter out of cardboard and exist in the marginal cracks of exterior physical spaces.

This piece uses photographic images the Old Town Mall in Baltimore as a backdrop for the behaviors of ghost-like characters that populate a former model of utopian possibility. Old Town Mall was one of numerous experiments across the U.S. in urban mall development that strove to bring mid-century suburban shoppers, back downtown. Initially popular, the Old Town Mall is now mostly abandoned. This free-standing six-channel rear-projected video installation, standing four feet tall and over forty feet long, with panels hinged at an angle from each adjoining panel, references the Asian screen, once a popular decorative device used to separate interior spaces. With China as a competing economic power that has usurped the manufacturing base that was once the economic mainstay of U.S. cities such as Baltimore, the piece is a contemporary media work, which speaks to urban entropy, underscoring current class and cultural partitions.

An edited version of the 14 minute video "Journey of the Invader Spirit". . Filmed in Brazil, with local participants, a pernicious ‘Invader Spirit’ travels the land wreaking environmental havoc on the population. The Invader then gets challenged by ‘unseen forces’; micro-algae (represented by Capoeira practitioners) founds in marine life that take on in the form of spiritual entities.

(Use of music by obtained with permission from Artista, Intérprete: Eudoxia De Barros (2002), Distribuidora de CDs: Paulinas, Brasil: Have signed documentation)

Within the digital universe, is the GIF file. A MEME of connective tissue, it is easily made, replicated and shared through social media. It has inadvertently become an ephemeral means of social bonding, wherein visual snatches of everyday life, operating within infinite moments of repetitive gestures, and gaffes, are created in hoped for recognition through remunerative clicks, downloads, and widespread monetization.

In reflecting on the GIF, and the economies in which it is embedded, I borrowed text from the book “The Road to Unfreedom” (by historian Timothy Snyder) and in eliminating most of the words from the chapter’s first page, the dictum becomes almost Buddhist in its reflection.

During Covid Val hosted a weekly online program called "Grandma's Place," where Silly Goose regularly mangled nursery rhymes.