Glowing Like Phosphorus: Dorothea Tanning and the Sedona Western

abstract: In the mid-1940s, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst left the urbane, avant-garde circles of Manhattan to build a house and studio in the then remote Southwestern outpost of Sedona, Arizona. Many have written of Ernst’s fascination with indigenous artefacts but there was another pop cultural format that emerged concurrently with their time in Sedona: the genre of the Hollywood Western. Indeed, films like John Wayne’s Angel and the Badman (1947) and Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford were filmed in the immediate vicinity, amidst the iconic red rock landscape. Tanning’s topographical mapping of the desert, as found in paintings such as Self-Portrait (1944), Evening in Sedona (1976), and novella Chasm: A Weekend (2004), feature some of those same scenic locations used as the backdrops in the Sedona Western. Comparisons between the self-presentation of Tanning and the actor Gail Russell are striking especially when one considers Tanning’s own performance in Hans Richter’s film 8 x 8 (1957). Moreover, the feminine, “phosphorus” glow, which Tanning recurrently uses in her painting and writing to describe the appearance of her female characters, matches the typical costuming of the lead women in Westerns, for example Russell’s Penny and Crawford’s Vienna. This article explores the complex role the Sedona Western played in the surrealist art and literature made during Ernst and Tanning’s Sedona period and beyond, particularly in terms of gender politics. In order to rethink this moment of “Western surrealism,” I offer a Tanning-centric perspective through methodological use of Mieke Bal’s feminist “autotopography.

Why Can't I Cry

This paper won a honorable mention writing flag award in the creative/reflective category. Che, writing for Kathleen Stewart’s ANT 325L class, “Ethnography of Emotion”.Stewart, KathleenUndergraduate Studie

Method for treating wastewater using microorganisms and vascular aquatic plants

A method for treating wastewater compresses subjecting the wastewater to an anaerobic setting step for at least 6 hours and passing the liquid effluent from the anaerobic settling step through a filter cell in an upflow manner. There the effluent is subjected first to the action of anaerobic and facultative microorganisms, and then to the action of aerobic microorganisms and the roots of at least one vascular aquatic plant

Rockhounding, Seafaring, and Other Material Tales for the End of the World

In the face of accelerated environmental degradation and climate instability, the future of the Earth and of all life on earth is difficult to visualize. Therefore, the different mediums through which we consider environmental issues are just as important as the actions we take to address them. Focusing on three projects combining art, science, and activism, this article suggests a compilation of material tales. They tell stories of plastic rocks and aluminum nuggets where the protagonists are partly finely crafted objects, partly waste materials, and sometimes both at once. Artists Kelly Jazvac, Yesenia Thibeault-Picazo, and the collective Studio Swine collaborate with scientists to offer different ways of experiencing environmental issues through objects and their materiality. They do so by cumulating gestures of making and collecting as a strategy to cope with our current epoch and to imagine its unfolding

Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world

Studying Form, Color, and Pictorial Composition in the New England Landscape

When I applied for a grant through the Research and Apprenticeship Program (REAP) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) during the spring of 2016, my intention was to gain more experience in the art of painting outdoors. By looking through the student work of my favorite painters I realized that most of them had spent some concentrated period of time studying landscape painting and producing dozens or even hundreds of small sketches of different scenes and times of day outdoors. I knew that if I was going to advance toward my own artistic goals, I needed to apply myself to those studies as well. First, I wanted to study different effects of light outdoors and learn more about color relations through the constant practice of observation and color mixing. Second, I wanted to learn more about how to express complex forms in a broad and simplified way, an underlying principle of theway nearly all great painters see the world. Third, I wanted to learn more about composing pictures by persistently producing small studies (usually between 8 x 10 inches and 12 x 16 inches) and thinking about the principles of good composition for each one. The complexity of landscape as a subject made it a great source of practice for all three of my goals.The best thing I gained from the summer’s work was actually something I lost. I lost the crippling timidity that often kept me from painting outside.I can deal with the fear of failure that stares back at you when you look at a blank canvas. I can deal with people laughing at my silly painting outfit or coming up and asking questions, with the wind blowing a wet canvas off my easel and into my clothing, with standing in the sun for hours on a hot day wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to shield my Irish skin. All that is part of the fun of landscape painting, and none of it distracts me much anymore. That’s good, because a landscape painter has too much else to think about

The Geoglyphs of the Atacama Desert: A Bond of Landscape and Mobility

In the northern-most area of Chile, stretching six hundred miles down the coast of South America and expanding more than forty thousand square miles into Bolivia, Peru and Argentina lies the Atacama Desert. This massive, barren landscape consists of expansive salt flats, out of which towering volcanoes extend, reaching twenty thousand feet into the sky. The Atacama Desert is known to be the driest desert in the world, with a landscape resembling that of Mars (Vesilind 2003). Despite this extreme and often harsh environment, the Atacama Desert has been home to a diverse population since as early as 10,000 B.P.. Emerging out of a transfusion of The Late Formative Period and the Period of Regional Developments (between 1000 and 1450 A.D.), a new tradition began (Briones 2006) that involved indigenous peoples branding the earth over which they traveled and these impressions remain today. These structures are called “geoglyphs” and embody the most fundamental aspects of archaeological landscape, including feelings of deep attachment to the earth, means of survival, and religious vestiges

Regional similarities in the distributions of well yield from crystalline rocks in Fennoscandia

Well yields from Precambrian and Palaeozoic bedrock in Norway, Sweden and Finland exhibit very similar and approximately log-normal distributions: all three data sets exhibit a median yield of 600–700 L hr-1, despite the differences in climate and lithology. This similarity is tentatively reflected on a larger geographical scale by a meta-analysis of the international data sets on crystalline rock aquifers from other recently glaciated areas (i.e., without a thick regolith of weathered rock). An heuristic treatment of the Fennoscandian data sets suggests that this median yield is consistent with the following bulk properties of shallow (to c. 70–80 m depth) crystalline bedrock: transmissivity of 0.56 ± 0.30 m2 d-1 (6.4 ± 3.4 x 10-6 m2 s-1) and hydraulic conductivity of around 1.1 (± 0.6) x 10-7 m s-1