by: Anna Frost
You stand in a gallery space in front of a set featuring an array of art made in many mediums: a photograph, a painting, a sculpture, a video of a dance, perfume, and a headset to listen to an audio track. You look at the photograph, then put on the headset and listen to a song that a musician wrote in reaction to the photo. As you take in the music, you look up at the video and see that the dancer is dancing to this music; she received the song and made the dance in response. You glance over at the painting, also inspired by the song, and the different elements begin to make sense along with the tune playing in your ears. Next, you touch the sculpture, which the artist made after watching the woman dance. The smell of the perfume is deep and earthy, and a sign tells you that it was created to mirror the painting. Lastly you read the words of a poem, written because of the perfume.
Each piece of artwork reaches out to interpret the next – all inspired by a photo, which you learn was taken on Martha’s Vineyard – in a worldwide game of artistic telephone. This is musician and artist Sally Taylor’s brainchild. This is Consenses.
The whole Consenses project is made up of 22 individual chains of artistic works, each beginning with a photograph taken of a landscape on Martha’s Vineyard by one of five professional Vineyard photographers. Vineyarders Alison Shaw, Elizabeth Cecil, Janet Woodcock, Peter Simon and Michael Zide all shot the photographs used in Consenses, Taylor said. Each photograph represents a different angle and season of the Vineyard.
Consenses, a project three years in the making, started as a way to discover the essence of Martha’s Vineyard through art, Taylor said. Pulling from her background in anthropology, Taylor decided to mimic the moral of a famous Indian parable. The story depicts a group of blind men arguing over what an elephant is, before a wise man tells them all to communicate with each other about the different parts of the animal to understand the elephant’s whole identity.
Though she did not tell anyone involved in the project at the time, the elephant in question would be Martha’s Vineyard. The secrecy was key in allowing people to interpret the natural beauty of the Vineyard, without becoming caught in their preconceived notions about the island.
“We are smack-dab in it, but everybody’s perspective of it is so valid and so different and unique…We didn’t want to be like, “Hey, guys, it’s Martha’s Vineyard! Come and have your unique perspective of it.’ We didn’t want to blab about it until we gave it some time to mature,” Taylor explained.
The 150 artists involved in Consenses did not know the subject of their art, nor did they know the identity of the artist whose work they would interpret, the title of the piece, or the location of creation. All each of them had was the art itself. This way, there would be no biases or expectations interfering with the core of the project – creating an understanding of beauty. When contacting artists, Taylor told those who asked for the names of other Consenses participants that this probably was not the right project for them.
“I really wanted Jimmy Buffet interpreting some obscure painter, and some very talented but unrecognized sculptor to be interpreting his work,” Taylor said. “I wanted to create a democracy within art, and that was very important to me. All of us have these have these incredibly valid perspectives but we don’t always weigh them that way, we call some people famous or important or worth celebrating and I feel like that misses that point.”
The project expanded as artists jumped on board to create for Consenses, including some of Taylor’s family – her mother, singer Carly Simon; father, singer James Taylor; brother, Ben Taylor, who wrote a song; cousin, Claudia Taylor, who wrote a poem – as well as Vineyard residents such as filmmaker Wes Craven.
For Taylor, the project also explores the nature of creativity and artistic expression through the relationships, or even lack thereof, between the artistic pieces.
“Does creativity – the beast that is creativity, the inspiration that is out there – does it use the medium of artistic creativity to express itself, to manifest itself? Does Muse use the artist to become material, to become matter and so that was the first sort of question. Is the unknown making itself visible through artists? Or is it human nature to be so afraid of the mystery that we have to make up commonalities, even though there might not be. So like, when I look at one chain and I look at the commonalities, which seem really obvious to me, is it just obvious to me because I’m so threatened by the idea of there not being commonalities? That I have to make up a story? Basically that’s the bigger sort of adventure in the space,” Taylor explained.
The grand opening of Consenses gallery in Vineyard Haven will take place on July 1 in the space above the clothing store Midnight Farm on Main Street with food, wine and music from 5 – 10 p.m. The gallery will stay open every day during the summer from 11 a.m. – 8 p.m., and then will be available on weekends during the off-season.
“We just want it to be a living room setting where people can come up and hang out and talk and explore the variations of each other’s versions of reality,” Taylor said.
Through interpretation stations where visitors can create their own artwork in response to the chains, as well as artistic workshops and performances throughout the summer, the Consenses gallery is a space for those on the island to experience the beauty of Martha’s Vineyard together.
“I want everybody – islanders and visitors – to be able to have a say in what the essence of this place is to them because only when all the blind men share their experiences can we actually understand the greater whole,” Taylor said.
