14.1 - Le Final

 Well, here we are! This is it! 

For my final project, I rolled the dice and fate gave me, "voice" "fabric/textiles" and "digital photography." And so in the subsequent weeks, I pondered what to do. I pondered my options ranging from wildly ambitious to ideas I weren't super excited about but would suffice. I was running out of time, I had a stomach flu, and I needed to make a choice. 

So I landed on this idea: 2. Fabric stop motion based on a speech. Speech will play over stop-motion animation (which I know is digital photography+ but... it could count?)

I started researching speeches. I got bored. What if I did a song instead? And I thought about what kind of songs tell a story, or send a message? How can musicians use their voice to support the story? 

Rewind: I have been preparing to start volunteering with the Columbia Justice in Education Initiative to teach art at Rikers Island. Carceral reform and education is something I'm interested in learning more about. So with this framework, I was reminded of the story of the blues musician, Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) who, while imprisoned in Texas in 1925 wrote a song in Governor Pat Neff's honor, who in turn, pardoned him. He was unfortunately later incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) – a place I have some personal history with: they have a twice-yearly rodeo/craft fair, and I went a few times. While detained, folklorists/ethnomusicologists Alan and John Lomax met him and recorded his music there. His work with the Lomax's got Leadbelly released early for good time, and with the their help he started a career as a recording and touring musician. Make no mistake, there were some inherently biased and dysfunctional racial/power dynamics at play in their business relationship (Lomaxs' were white historians with connections, Leadbelly was a Black musician with a record). For the purposes of this project, though, I'm interested in the works incarcerated individuals create, in spite of (or because of?) the horrifically violent conditions – especially at a place like Angola.

It is with this history that I made this series "in collaboration" with Leadbelly: 

Process: 

The song I chose was Leadbelly's recording of "The Midnight Special" which he recorded while at Angola. It's s a song from the point of view of an incarcerated individual, with the chorus referencing the lights of the passenger train, The Midnight Special. 

In both I used Photoshop to edit a photo of the entrance of Angola (black and white, curves, color halftone). In the top image, I cut 122" of yarn (1 inch for each second in his song, "The Midnight Special"). The bottom image is an arbitrarily long strand of yarn that I molded to match the wavelengths of the song. I wanted the yarn (or, the song) to foreground the prison gates.   

The last piece is a stop-motion of 122" of yarn, which is an allegory for Leadbelly's voice, gradually obscuring Angola.