Excerpt of video installation: You Tube
Full Video of Original Production in 2001
Sculpture / Video Installation
James Fuhrman, sculptor; Mark Warhol, composer; Gary Joyner, librettist
Burned oak, painted wood, media, 65 x 45 x 60″, 2011
Video: James Fuhrman, James Peitzman
Ensemble Warhol:
Françoise Vanhecke, soprano; Jake Endres, baritone
Catherine Issalys, flute; Michel Viau, marimba
Exhibitions:
— ‘Opposites Attract’, UArts⁄ Philadelphia Sculptors, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
— Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2011-12
Mark Warhol’s expressionistic opera, The Blind Tongue, is projected onto James Fuhrman’s deeply textured oak sculpture and within Fuhrman’s sense of space. The collaboration expands the visual and conceptual contexts of each artist and their separate works. Ancientness, timelessness and connection to the ground run through both artists’ work.
The music’s underlying themes are of “thirst, obsession, desperation, hysteria”. The libretto is based on the legend that some arctic peoples hunt wolves by imbedding a sharp blade in a block of ice. As a wolf licks the ice for water his tongue is cut and tasting blood, feverishly keeps licking the ice, slicing his tongue to pieces and thereupon bleeding to death.
Next: Performance Collaboration