Lights of Conversations - A Call and Response

We need your help. Please read on.

A collaboration between Sylvi Herrick and poet, Janessa Martin using verse from her poems, fear of crows (and blackness) and a crow’s message.

A work in progress, launching soon.

This urgent work is my direct response to the current moment, wondering what I can do as a human, citizen and artist to continue all the conversations and clarity that we must reach in order to create real change and racial equality.

Please take a look at this work and if you would like to be a part of supporting the conversation for change in your community or more broadly. Placing this work across the country is my vision because this is an ongoing conversation. I need your help with this. This conversation is so big we need everyone to participate. 

HOW YOU CAN HELP.

This work is portable, scalable, electric, emotive, replicable, designed to be outside - we just need the proper public spaces to draw people into a focused dialogue. We can implement this on a big scale in multiple places simultaneously. 

I am seeking partners who can help co-create public exhibitions of this work in your community or others. You can help support, Lights of Conversations, by:

  • sending specific ideas for public locations that would work best,

  • helping facilitate installations,

  • contributing to the fabrication of the work itself,

  • connecting me to others who might be interested in this work or supporting this work.

I would be tremendously grateful. We must act with a sense of urgency if we are ever going to have transformational change. 

Thank you, let’s connect and have THE conversation!

Sylvi Herrick
sylvi@sylviherrick.com
904-806-8777

A CALL AND RESPONSE

Common ground in public space. Flashing back and forth mimicking dialogue. The two neon verses face each other and represent a conversation which requires more than one person. Creating a brave, inclusive, contemplative, encouraging peace. People activate the work by being in the delicate meeting place in between while their perception/discussions become the soul of the work. Passersby, the community, are in it, part of it, expanding on it, an opportunity to address the why.

Installed outside of buildings, in public space weaving luminous colorful lights with poetry by Janessa Martin, artist Sylvi Herrick’s ‘Lights of Conversations,’ builds on the current activism and discussions about racism and inequalities in America and hopes to evoke enduring new discussions and clarity about underlying prejudices, how they impact us all, how we must respect and learn from each other to create and nurture a new and equal future for everyone.

There is still power in the written and spoken word. The conceptual elements in the work will leverage opening up real time conversations and aid in the transformation of fears and misinformation, spread compassion and hopefully nudge hearts towards the fight for solutions.

Conceptual Elements:

Verse
Call and Response - a statement quickly followed by an answering statement, a technique in music, a pattern in speech, the basis of democratic participation. Because we must have focused, deep, personal, painful conversations with each other, and with ourselves. Humanity’s evolution depends on us.

Light
Neon is a primordial element, a colorless and odorless gas in its natural state. Neon is from the Greek word neon for “new,” - using art and illumination to create new ways of relating to one another. Light is how we see the world, perceive colors, it nourishes us and lives within us all.

Place
Creating an aesthetic experience where people share the location, are looking, pausing, contemplating, praying, walking, stopping, biking, hanging out, visiting. We need support from people on all sides of a communal space.

Urgency
Lightness/darkness (flashing light back and forth) is used to prompt action and interest. This moment in time requires our ability to be honest with ourselves, personal introspection, and receptivity in order for us as a society to search for clarity, heal and evolve. Feminine forces of listening, empathy, vulnerability at the heart of the work.

Color
Neon colors simultaneously demands to be seen and softens edges. A localized space becomes bathed in colors, in this case it will be the combination of colors which is purple. Complementary colors blue and magenta, opposite sides of the color wheel. “Colors are friends of their neighbors and lovers of their opposites.” Marc Chagall.