REWILDERMENT
was an interdisciplinary collaboration between C. Ryder Cooley and Sarah Falkner, utilizing performance, installation, photography and process-based media. The project began with REWILDERMENT part 1, FILM THEORY: animal disasters/animal sanctuaries, a debut performance at DownStreet Arts in North Adams, MA on September 29, 2011—the piece was also performed at Bluestockings Books in New York City on January 10, 2012, and was filmed.
In August 2012, Cooley and Falkner created an installation lair – an active working space/work-in-progress – at TSL Gallery, Hudson NY and engaged in durational performance pieces in and around the Hudson Valley, including the Hudson NY Community Garden.
Posted at sites of encounter:
REWILDERMENT is a Dreamtime whose inhabitants and visitors transgress borders of time, space, identity, gender and species. Transpersonal and transpecies consciousness, communication and cooperation guide REWILDERMENT’s inhabitants, who facilitate their ruptures between dimensions with a ritual sigil that is coded map, gateway and hypnotic trigger; the sigil is inscribed in artificial materials, organic elements and REWILDERMENT’s human custodians’ flesh. Symbolic actions are taken in one dimension to effect change in another in the interest of reclaiming and liberating the contained and constrained, and a basic drive towards transmutation. Visitors can enter or encounter REWILDERMENT via various media appealing to different senses and modes, and stations within the installation/process lair have simultaneous documentary, navigational and oracular functions.
The piece’s last three-dimensional realtime/realspace manifestation was a multimedia exhibition opening Samhain/October 31, 2013 at MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams, MA.
