Daphane Park prepares her “Superconductor” healing installation by circling it with a feather and smudging with burning incense (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Honeyspace
148 Eleventh Ave. between 21st & 22nd Sts.
Through Saturday, April 10, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (9:00 on April 10)
www.honey-space.com
twi-ny slide show
New York-based artist Daphane Park has reimagined Wilhelm Reich’s controversial orgone accumulator in Chelsea’s Honeyspace gallery, creating an organic “Superconductor” where visitors can gather with friends or meditate on their own while experiencing its many mysteries. Primarily composed of raw silk and cotton held together by steel wire, the welcoming tentlike space, a striking combination of deep red, pink, gold, and silver, feels as if it has an energy, a life-force, all its own, enhanced by a subtle but powerful electronic noise soundtrack by David Marshall, Rachael Bell, and Derrick Barnicoat. Incorporating holistic healing methods with shamanistic ritual, Park gives a performance every day from 3:00 to 6:00, using the architectural structure in addition to a pair of symbolic hammocks, a piano with lighted candles and a black skull on it, and a platform of old, broken musical instruments. The exhibit, curated by Karen Dorothee Peters, ends on April 10 at 7:00 with Lance White Magpie, a direct descendant of Crazy Horse, performing a special Lakota shamanic ritual set to live music. To fully experience “Superconductor,” which Park also envisions as a type of renewal, be sure to take off your shoes and go inside the installation, where you will feel like you’re experiencing another level of emotional and psychological consciousness.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.
