CIRCA Presents: Two Works by John Sturgeon

This event marks the inaugural CIRCA Presents event, a series championing important new works in the performing and visual arts.

UMBC Professor John Sturgeon of Visual Arts will debut his video with which we sleep (2015), and present ARCHIVIST: cleaving among the houses (2010), both produced and directed by the artist. John Sturgeon will screen his works and engage the audience in conversation around these two works, which serve as a capstone to his career at UMBC. A reception on the Terrace of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building will follow.

with which we sleep
John Sturgeon, ©2015, 19 minutes, stereo

with which we sleep ruminates poetically on the gradual dawning of that point in a relationship when a couple senses things are beginning to go awry, or the façade of intimacy reveals it may already be crumbling around them. Subterranean indicators surface, tripping their way with inappropriate gestures, the oblique inadvertent comment – worries begin to manifest. Has this gone beyond saving, or worse - is our union already lost?

Each night our little cart trundles its oblivious cargo

to and fro about the ancient tower

whose indifferent chiaroscuro

strips bare the awful things

with which we sleep -

shuttering further these two

who cling so ardently beneath their gloaming.

ARCHIVIST: cleaving among the houses
John Sturgeon, © 2010, 21:30 minutes, stereo

Archivist is an experimental poetic work spun from a train-rush of collective imprints of war and idiosyncratic archiving of those impressions as memory. Formally, the primary visual dynamic is revealed by multi-stream image collage as diptychs or triptychs, then at other times multiple moving frames of information scrolling or overlapping with the larger frame. The poetic thread is delivered by voiceover and performance text fused with acoustic compositions by Associate Professor Stephen Bradley and Sturgeon.

Arching from the collective to the personal – themes of war and sanctioned abuse move through touchstone-images shot on location in a Cold War barracks in southern Germany, news footage of the invasion of Iraq, photographic archives of the U.S. Civil War and WWII to German 15th Century texts. These specific images are mixed with more subterranean themes - a cicada infestation, a stone quarry fused with a medical cadaver lab, and finally trundling towards a poetic meditation on personal cargo and mortality.