 I'm Andrea Hornick. I'm an artist who has been commissioned to do a piece here at the Barnes Foundation, a sound piece in the Permanent Collection Gallery. I want to, first of all, say thank you to the Barnes, to the curators who I worked with, Martha Lucy and Shelly Bernstein, and to the director, Tom Collins. For all of the other people, especially the AV people, who I've worked with closely and have been very supportive of this work. It's a really unusual piece for the Barnes, and they're starting to try to bring in contemporary work into the Permanent Collection, which can't be altered, but sound is one way to bring in contemporary work and to alter the collection. So the piece upstairs that you can hear that I did is called Unbounded Histories. And I chose that title because I'm working with art history, I'm working with these ensembles that Dr. Barnes created in order for the collection to have these kind of symmetrical situations where the work is hung. And you, I'm sure you're familiar with that if you've been through the collection. And they're sort of slightly overhung, they're very densely hung. And so what I did was I created a sound piece, which is a narrative that combines art history and this shamanic narrative. And the shamanic narrative is something I will describe later on for you and I will actually lead you through the process that I did in doing my sound piece. It's a process where I could generate narratives and where I had generated narratives in the past for other work of mine, which I will show you. So I will be drumming and you will get to encounter your animal spirit guide. So that's how I encountered the narratives was I went with my animal spirit guide and asked for information to connect various paintings together. So in any given room I use about four paintings out of many, many more which are hung in there. When paintings are hung as they're curated and as you see them and interact with them, you project narratives onto them and they have relationships to each other or they form relationships. So I was very interested in that and I started to use that groupings of work in my own work. And so the curator here Martha Lucy saw that I had done that and that I had this kind of epic poem that went with this combination of reproductions of portraits that I added animal spirits into. So this kind of narrative is something that you can hear when you walk around the galleries. It's a epic poem that animates and kind of creates these relationships between the works and hopefully invites you to create your own relationships or think what your kind of own projections or responses to the works might be. Rather than only taking in or listening to the art historical information that you might hear in an audio guide or that you might read. So these are some of the images I'll show you of my own work. And you can see that the titles are long and narrative and they combine the art history with the shamanic information. So this kind of narrative that appears to me when I do this kind of trance that you will get to experience. So these are reproductions of portraits of women, Renaissance portraits that I have painted and then painted the animals into. And the animals act as kind of alter egos of the women to kind of bring their own sort of internal self back to their idealized self which has been omitted by themselves as well as by the painters who paint them as they are sitting for painters who have been commissioned usually by their husbands in order to create a portrait that sort of displays the family propriety and gives them kind of status. And so the animals sort of bring them back down to earth and they are humorous, they're meant to be humorous as well as sort of bolster them. So this was the configuration that I had for the last show that I had where these paintings are hung in groups of threes and you're listening to the epic poem that kind of narrates the relationships between these paintings that I found out through the art historical information and the shamanic experience. So in this group of three all the animals come from this kind of safari landscape. And they're hung in this kind of way so that it forces those relationships. This is a sort of connected sort of side project where I paint animals into existing copies of earlier masterpieces. And it's a collaboration with a collector so I'm also finding animals for them. The animals are both the collector's animal spirit as well as in this case Mary and St. John and Christ. So these are more earlier works and the narratives are a little less elaborate but it's the same idea. This is a collected group of works that I brought together, reproduced these images of Renaissance portraits and then painted animals into them. So this is the kind of main piece in the Barnes collection out of about 45 pieces that I used to kind of hold the whole project. And this is a statue that's about this big. It's an owl goddess. It's Greek. And she kind of to me, even though she's small, she is the most powerful object in the collection. So this kind of starts off. I'm just going to kind of show you about 10 images, sort of touchstones that I used in this process. So this is the next one where the animals are dancing and these kind of spirits are dancing. So in the beginning we kind of do this drumming and rattling to welcome the spirits and since when you're walking through the Barnes collection, you don't have a chance to do that or if you did start dancing and there people might look at you, funny, or the guards might mind, you know, these animals in this painting can kind of do that for you. And hopefully my intention is for you to kind of the reading of it that you listen to is trance-like. And I hope that you kind of enter into a sort of meditative or trance-like state as you walk through and listen and look. Another thing that the piece does is it helps you to connect with maybe three or four works per room more intimately rather than being sort of overwhelmed. This next piece is a opening and so in the drum journey you enter into a tunnel through a hole. And then you can use also bodies of water to move around from the lower world to the upper world or back and forth. And this is St. George and his horse slaying the dragon and the dragon, the slide's a little dark, is down there. So we listen to this in the room with about six paintings that are narrated and the characters kind of move around from painting to painting and then they end up back here and then we can jump into that body of water to move on throughout the museum galleries. This is another touchstone I used where the woman standing there has found this bear that she's sort of courting as possible new power animal. And she connects to this bear but then you see this hunter over here and there's a whole narrative around that. But the point is that for me was important because this painting was the first painting that I chose for this and it was kind of a prototype. I did a prototype piece around this painting and some surrounding paintings and as I worked with it I had had a bear kind of come in and out of my journeys and then working with this painting made it so that the bear was really one of my main animal spirit guides. So then over here you see there's a hole in the rocks and so you need to be able to enter the earth through a hole and that's, so we're using this Ceylon painting to enter again to go back down into the lower world. In this painting you were going back up to the upper world through that sky and the colors in the water and then we go back down and exit into a Renoir painting that's adjacent. In this the one on the left for me reminded me of my paternal grandmother and it's sort of this gnarly Soutine painting and then the one on the right was this angel. It's actually St. Michael but it's sort of in the narrative it has this kind of imperfect quality and it's very fallible and the two of them are hung close together so the question is what is the effect that the paintings have on each other over time in this kind of permanent installation. And this is an example of a kind of larger sort of idea of bringing works from different rooms into the same narrative. The figures on the left are Van Gogh and for me they were father figures and the top was sort of my father, the bottom was an uncle, the top right was me and the bottom right was the uncle's daughter. And then they all end up at a dinner party with other characters and in locations that you can see in landscapes in the galleries and it's sort of this expanded narrative. And then you end in room one which is actually the first room you walk into so I have you starting kind of up top in an obscure room and then ending with the beginning. So it's really about agency and history is written where things are, certain people write the history, certain things are left out, certain things are included, sometimes history is rewritten. And so, you know, it's kind of to question and to bring your own voice of authority. So this painting is just to kind of, it's one of those large Picasso paintings in the first room and it also has this kind of father-daughter narrative which links into the other paintings on that floor. All right, so at this point I would like to tell you a little bit, if you have any questions, I'll take some questions and then I would like to tell you a little bit more about the process and then we will kind of get into the journey and you can experience it yourself. Yes, it is a very kind of classist situation. I'm sorry, yeah, it wasn't really, that wasn't the intention, you know, but that's just how it worked out for the budget and what we had for the show, yeah. So is it 100% ideal? No, but I do think that if you want, I have been here with groups before and they have found devices so perhaps if it's not too crowded when you come and you ask they can find you something, yeah. Any other questions? Okay. So we'll have time for questions after the journey which you probably will have questions about. For this process it's great if there's a space between you and the person next to you like one empty seat or else I can invite you to lie down up here or on the sides which you don't need to do right this second but if you want to lie down that will be an option as well. Yes, yes, I'm getting there, okay. Yeah, so this process is listening to drumming and it's a monotone drum and it mimics the heartbeat of the earth. So you listen to this and we would call it kind of a trance but in the shamanic language it's an alternate reality and you access it, you start by I will lead you into a kind of very light hypnotic trance and then you will find, you will go to a place in your imagination that is your power place in nature something that you are familiar with and feel comfortable and grounded in. So you will go to your power place and it's a sort of relaxation hypnosis and then you will go to your power place and you will ask to meet your animal spirit guide and the first being that appears, it may be an animal, it may be some other type of religious figure or other type of figure that kind of has power and authority to you. So this figure may be your animal or power being or it may be leading you to the power animal. So what you want to do is make sure that your power place has a way, has an entrance to the lower world. It needs to be a body of water or a hole in a tree or a hole in the ground, an animal's hole, something like that. It can be that you conflate to places and you move a hole that you know to your power place that you know but it's kind of better if the place you know has an entrance, has a hole or a body of water. Okay, so those are kind of the main instructions. Then I will begin drumming and you will follow this being making sure that you trust this being. It shouldn't be anything that we in our culture that you and your culture kind of deem as a vermin or something like that. So you can follow this being into the opening and you will enter into a series of tunnels or you may see something else. You may go right into a different landscape. It can be magical landscape. Yes, Celay. When you are doing this in your mind you are not still. In your mind you are moving and it's a very good question. Your body is still in this room but your spirit body is moving with your animal and you can become that animal or you can merge with the animal. You can be held by the animal even if it's a tiny bird. You could be small and it could be really large or you could be on its back or you could be flying next to each other or running together. Just be open to whatever happens. I'm going to give you instructions. Very clear instructions. The one thing to remember is don't leave anything there and don't take anything with you unless it's a very specific instruction from your animal spirit guide or being. When I switch the drum beat, the drum beat is like this. When it's time to return I'll stop for a second and do a series of... Then you know it's time to return and then the beat will be very fast and you will return on that fast, really sped-up beat and through that sped-up beat you will retrace your places that you've been. You can retrace your journey so that you can remember and so that you gather your whole self up as you return to your power place. You just want to listen for the change in the beat and then you know it's time to return. Try as best as you can. Don't feel a lot of pressure but try as best as you can to retrace your steps. It's a lot of information. Are there any questions? I will wake you up. You will wake up. The trance is not a heavy trance, it's a very light trance so you are completely in control of yourself the whole time. I cannot make you do anything that you don't want to do and you actually are awake. You're awake, you're actually in a heightened state of awareness even though you're deeply relaxed. So now is the time to move if you need to have a space, a seat in between you or if you'd like to come up and lie down here or on the side. You need to not be touching anybody. That's why there needs to be an empty seat in between you. Now if you have a phone please make sure that it's not going to make any noise whatsoever. It's very important that no noise or like if you wanted to leave you should leave at this point because any noise, even any very subtle noise can wake someone out of this and it's much better to retrace your steps and come out of this in the proper way. So try to be still, I don't think you really have to try but I just have to put it out there and when you come out of this, if you want to write it down, write your experience down on your phone you can, it's sort of like recording a dream. The experience is a bit like a dream and when you write it down you remember it much better than if you don't write it down right away. I'm going to drum for 20 minutes and then we can have some questions and answers so you could leave after the 20 minutes. I would say that through the relaxation you will get to readjust a tiny bit but yeah, you should be in a place where you feel like you can really relax whatever is the most relaxing and supportive. Lying down is good. No, it's good. Well, you can try it. If you don't like it you can go back to your seat. Yeah, it's not cold. And the whole room is free. You can choose a space that you feel comfortable in. It's just important not to be touching others. If you wanted to come on this side you could. So I learned this process when I was nine years old from a family friend who was a shaman. He was a Harvard-trained anthropologist who went to live with the Hevorro in Peru and then eventually after many trips he decided that he wanted to become a shaman and share this work with the West. So he was kind of in the late 60s one of the first people to bring this work to the West and kind of contemporaneous with Carlos Castaneda but not using hallucinogenic drugs, using sound instead. And this kind of sound process can be found in pretty much every culture worldwide or most cultures. There are different instruments involved. So the first thing you need to do is make sure your arms and your legs are not crossed and your arms are not touching your body. So they're beside you. And take a very deep breath and release your breath. So take about four more deep breaths and feel the breath go all the way down in through your nose, through your throat, down through your chest and belly, and then exhale deeply. So yeah, we'll get there. So yes, if your eyes naturally close, that's fine. Your eyes can close now or they can close in several minutes. Feel the chair beneath your body. Feel the leather against your hand. Feel your clothes against your skin. Take another deep breath in through your nose all the way down to your belly and as you exhale, feel the weight of your body drop into the chair. Start to feel your jaw relax. You can let your jaw hang slack. And again, inhale deeply. As you exhale, let the weight of your body drop into the chair. Feel the chair or the ground coming up to support your body and continue to take several more deep breaths on your own. Become aware of any sounds that you're hearing and the heaviness of your eyelids. So your eyelids should remain shut at this point and continue to breathe in. Feel the breath go in through your nose, down through your throat, into your chest and belly. Feel your belly rise and fall and let the breath come back out, up through your chest, throat and out through your nose. So you're slowing down the breath and you're letting your body weight drop. And now picture that you are in your power place in nature. Are you lying on sand or grass or dirt? Is it sunny and you feel the warmth of the sun or do you feel cool air? Can you feel a breeze or wind? Are there sounds? Feel the texture of whatever the ground is beneath your skin. Is it coarse or smooth? And inhale again, breath in through your nose, through your throat and chest, into your belly and as you exhale, feel your body drop into this texture in your power place. Feel the earth here supporting your body. And now ask to meet your animal spirit guide or power being. And the first being that you see may be your animal or it may lead you to your power animal or guide. You may ask it if it is your power animal or guide and it may answer you in language or you may just know or you may see the being from at least three views that's one way to know. Just what you feel in terms of following this animal or being. If you stay in your power place with your animal throughout the journey, that's fine. And if the animal or being takes you through the lower world on a journey to experience other places then that will be another experience. It is just as valuable to spend time with your power animal in your power place. I will begin drumming and you will travel with your animal or guide. When you hear the beat change, it is time to return and you will follow the path that you took down to the lower world. Back up to your power place. To feel your fingers and your skin against the ground. I'll give you a few minutes to make some notes of your journey if you would like to. Okay, so are there any questions about the things you experienced, about the specific being or animal that you met, about places that you saw, about feelings or sensations, anything you'd like to share or any questions about my work and the inspiration or generation from this process? I know exactly what you mean. Yes, when I was nine and I learned this, I thought that it was all in my imagination that I had made it up. I mean, I have a couple answers. One is that they come from the same place, your imagination and this kind of alternate reality. And then also, I think you can trust. You know, I think it's an exercise in trusting and starting to know as you practice it more. So these kind of recordings for this drumming are available and I can give you names of people, places to find it. But if you do this practice, regularly or more often, you start to understand when it is that you're maybe in your head too much. But we do a lot to prepare, you know, in terms of this sort of short trance. And unless you feel like you're not able to relax, if you're relaxed, I would say you can trust it. If you're very much in your head and you're having trouble being present and you're not relaxed, then maybe you're inventing, but I would say to just trust it. And it doesn't matter anyway. You had these experiences that gave you this opportunity to connect with feelings about those people or to those people. Like how can one do that? Is that your question? Okay, so for more personal reasons rather than for generating painting or even with both? So I guess maybe you came in late toward the end. Yeah, okay, so I talked for a while about it but I'm happy to go over again and we can talk afterwards as well but I can go back and show a couple of images but basically what I do, and it's a good question because now everybody has been through it so they can kind of understand a little better. These are the barn's images and I created a sound piece for the barns that you can hear while you walk through the permanent collection and I asked the question of my power animal. So now that you have your power animal you can go back and ask the power animal any question as long as it's a very straightforward question and it's not a yes or no question. So you can ask a question. So my questions were how are these works? I chose about 45 works. How are they related? What are the relationships? And I sort of went over why I'm doing that which I could inform you about and then I sort of saw the narratives of how these objects were connected and historical figures in paintings or in the sculptures so it started to create this narrative on top of what you would find in art history and so I'm sort of questioning the authority of the institution but I'm also elaborating upon any story that might be given in order to kind of ask people to be the kind of creators of their own experience so that after this experience perhaps you have ideas about how you relate to a work that you can just trust in this art setting but it is kind of a microcosm for everything and so for your life. So you can ask any kind of question to do with your personal growth or problems or obstacles and you can actually journey for healing. You usually go to the upper world for healing and you can also encounter your ancestors or other figures for healing in the upper world. Yeah, right, Dr. Barnes. So that's a good question. In the beginning I was allowed to go into the collection and lay down in front of this particular object which I felt was a very powerful object and sort of held the whole project for me so I laid down with my head facing this object and listened to the drumming in that space and I actually encountered Dr. Barnes and asked his permission and sort of got this information from him that in forming this collection he was being kind of a renegade and working outside of the accepted norms of museum collecting and collecting at the time in the United States and Philadelphia. So that's why he built it for Mary and versus in Center City. So he was excited in sort of giving permission and excited that the curators, so there are some new curators here and a relatively new director of the museum and they're doing some projects like this. So they were trying to mix up his collection a little bit. This is a way to bring contemporary work in because it was stipulated when he died that no works should be moved from the ensembles that he created. And these are some of my paintings where I add animals into reproductions that I paint of women from the Renaissance. So now maybe that you've had the experience you can see how some of the relationships between the animals and the women are. So some of them are painted in more seamlessly than others. Other questions? Does that answer? Yes, and it can, I think also I use this spiritual practice in order to do that, but it can be other aspects as well that are creative or inventive on anybody's part at any time, right? When you walk into a situation like this where the institution has quite a bit of authority, you want to be still questioning everything and sort of taking it into your own hands in your own mind, so here or when you read the newspaper. Anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not here, no. The piece that's here is the sound work. Yeah, yes. How to discern. Say that last part again? Right. They're... I mean the way I learned it was as a child so it was just do this practice and just the more you do it the more you'll be able to discern. And it is a way of empowering yourself so when you go to your power place of nature, for example, it is restorative and it restores you and I think that part of that is bringing you to center and kind of starting to eliminate doubt. And any mindfulness practice helps in this process immensely, so if you meditate or practice yoga or if you bike ride and it clears your mind those type of things can make you more receptive and also more clear in discerning what to follow. I think that often you take mundane images for granted in this experience but if a mundane object shows up and you sort of want to dismiss it don't dismiss it, you know, follow everything and sort of one word I really like is yield. So you kind of yield to these things instead of trying to think what is that what is it here for just kind of you surrender a little bit and yield to what it has, let it come to you. Does that answer? Hey. Those are all good. Those are all good clues, yeah. Yeah, little things like that are reassurances that you have a connection to that animal. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah, do you have that experience that you've had? I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, when I'm drumming I see I have these sort of blips of different animals and atmospheres coming through sometimes and today I have that quite a bit. So I do think it's a combination of the group, the space, everything, the time of day. This is a very internal part of the year. It's winter and we're going inside and sometimes your body really wants this and your mind, everything, you kind of want this now. But I do think I've had very different experiences in a large group or a small group if you're close to people or far from people in terms of whether it kind of increases your experience and your connection personally but also if you're taking in energies or sharing and so that can actually be a good thing and not just like somebody else's stuff where you can pollinate each other's experiences in a healing way and that you shouldn't dismiss that. Anything else? It is actually that I have a website and if you look up my name you find it and the piece is online. There's a link on the sign upstairs so that is actually available to anybody anytime so you can hear the pieces even if you're not here. I think you have a little bit of time, yeah, about half an hour and there's a little kiosk, a little desk out in the main lobby in large space before you enter the permanent collection galleries and there's a sign there and someone's standing there they will give you a set of white headphones that are kind of these immersive headphones and you plug it into your web-enabled phone if you have one and then plug in the website, the link so you can then experience the piece, yeah. The immersive headphones and the fact that you're going in to just kind of a few works in a room what's purposeful in terms of the kind of situation of being a bit overwhelmed in the collection. Yeah, so thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's great to hear. Your dream? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I do have the experience of having done classes like this and also other contexts for learning about dream interpretation, various methods and working with your dreams and I think that that is... are all skills that you can use in interpreting and also in just being... in opening to this work, yeah. Yeah, and any work that you do that makes you more open and in tune helps the other work you do. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I think I don't know. I don't know. I don't really... Yeah, it just happened. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I did actually have this overwhelming sense of gratitude at some point, so maybe I was sensing it, but yeah. So yes, you're free to go and experience the piece if you have time, if you haven't. Yes, it'll be here through February 19th.