Evoco is a performance and installation that occurs in three stages:
1. Performance
2. Meditation and painting.
3. Finished scrolls.
Here you see one facet and stage of Evoco ~ the installation and the scrolls.
The scrolls were created through intentional phases, a process as ritual for the artist as a way to contemplate how one holds, interprets, and transmutates memory. Evoco is an encompassing practice that takes place over several months and years. Its genesis is the performance and the inky imprints created through the element of chance. Many moons later, the artist revisits the imprints, choosing only one. She then sits in meditation with it, staring unmoving, until she experiences what she calls “self-induced hallucinations.” She paints spurred on by these visions.
In many of the performances she takes the form of the character “Yamamba,” a character she created with elements of Japanese folktales, archetypes of the crone, and visual symbols from historical eras of Japan.
Flowing in constant movement with the dancer partner, Midori uses flowers and ropes to alter the human form, ever challenging the dancer to explore new motions, to explore their bodily relationship to space. The dancer’s interpretation in turn stirs Midori to create the next shape. When precise moments and forms impels Midori, she washes sumi ink over the dancer, pressing paper upon the form, trusting in chance to capture that fleeting beauty and experience of grace. In Evoco, they create in circularity of collaboration.
~ ~
“We are coming to accept the reproduction of aggregate fragments, collected over repeated replication, to reach some greater truth. Yet neurologically memory is constantly altered, with each recollection, some neural pathways are strengthened while others atrophy. With each remembrance, some details fade and others expand. Every recollection mutates the memory further and further from [the] original moment’s experience.” -Midori
