Annick & Tony: A Talking Portrait Story exhibited at 2007 FLUID media event at Local Project, Queens New York.
Annick & Tony: A Talking Portrait Story produced and directed by Sherry Tompalski & Graham Thompson, was presented on the opening night of the FLUID film festival, July 15th 2007 at 5PM in the Main Screening room @ Local Project, Long Island City 21-36 44rd, LIC, Queens 11101 .
The Local Project Gallery’s FLUID EVENT featured Video Art, Motion Graphics, Live Performances, Interactive Installations, Music Videos, and Narratives.
Annick & Tony: A Talking Portrait Story
Tony Martins is founding editor and creative director of Guerilla magazine (www.getguerilla.ca), a quarterly publication that examines “culture at ground level” online since 2004. A native of Toronto, Tony holds an MA in English from the University of Waterloo. Guerilla looks through a wide-angle lens to create material that is substantial, intelligent, diverse, approachable, curious, experimental, and presented from multiple viewpoints.
Guerilla publishes feature stories, essays, images, and a variety of contributions from artists, arts writers, and cultural observers. All artistic and creative forms are fair game, including those now emerging. Guerilla will approach subject matter “at ground level” (i.e., with no agenda other than to examine what’s out there), placing equal significance on high art and raw expression, on the celebrated and the unknown, on the historic and the avant-garde. Guerilla exists to get people talking within and across cultural circles in a new kind of public dialogue. Guerilla publishes paid advertising but will never be advertising-driven. Published quarterly, Guerilla is independently owned and managed.
Transcript of Tony’s Talking Portrait
[TONY] … So how did you reach the conclusion that purple would be my color? Just a feeling, a total intuition?
[SHERRY] Yes, I just thought of you.
[TONY] I’m a gemini, 2 individuals or something. There was always a tension going on between the 2, and I also like to think that I have a fair bit of feminine within me. There is no self until you are in a relationship, then its only through the relationship that you can…
[SHERRY] Yes.
[TONY] My father’s father was from Portugal and he emigrated to Guyana, northern most tip of South America, but culturally, it is part of the Caribbean. So my dad is very much a West Indian man, my dad is a musician and a cultural developer, he lives in the Cayman Islands now. But I’m a strange mix, my mother is Scottish…Yes there also is a little black blood in there too, because my father’s mother, her ancestors, there was some racial mixing going on there for sure. Soccer and volleyball are my two big sports. They had an entrance scholarship competition, so I ah, sent work in and they invited me to come to campus. So much into sports and into artwork and culture.
[SHERRY] Yes.
[TONY] The story of yourself, is retold over and over again though the course of our lives. And you enter into a new relationship, you’ve got a new story, hopefully, and if you don’t, your probably not being very honest with yourself.
The Talking Portrait Series
Portraiture through unseen collaboration with others “Talking Portraits” installations of wife and husband Sherry Tompalski and Graham Thompson use technology to capture a “co-creation” that is mostly invisible, highly intuitive, and quintessentially human. evidence of human intuition.
The Talking Portraits series documents the creation of Tompalski’s oil-on-canvas portraits using three integrated components: the finished portrait; a time-lapse video of the portrait in the making; and an audio recording of whatever Tompalski’s subjects verbalize while beneath the gaze of the portraitist.
As you may see in the three talking portraits we present here, the sum total is an almost spooky emergence of a distinct personality through shape, colour, image, and sound. “co-create” my portrait. She had intuited the colour that best represents my conception of self and confidently used it as the foundation for the portrait. capturing my intuitive approach to portraiture. We viewed the videos together, saw the possibilities, and began experimenting with voice tracks, music and time-lapse photography.”
SHERRY PAINTS 