Alan Ilagan

The Coming of StoneLight

Only in The Projects

This Month…

Kicking off the Fall season here on www.ALANILAGAN.com will be the official posting of the StoneLight project from November 2007. It will be found in The Projects section, assuming I recall how to upload all the pics and set up the thing (always a crap shoot for the technically-non-proficient).

The creation of StoneLight was a mostly peaceful, almost spiritual, affair. Shot in various cemeteries, and various stages of undress, it could have been a troublesome nightmare, but somehow it all worked out, and I managed to not be arrested (always a shock for certain people). It was also the first time I really focused solely on photography, with nary a line of prose interspersed. This project was all about the visuals, and its mostly black-and-white motif highlighted the shadows, the light, and the contours of the stone and the body.

The juxtaposition of the sacred and seemingly profane – in this case the blend of nudity and cemetery scenes – has always fascinated me, but the more I shot, the more the sacred aspects took over, and the nudity became a natural part of the landscape. Naked angels, along with fleshy cherubim and seraphim, floated in many parts of the cemeteries I visited. In fact, the amount of sculptures and tombstones featuring nudity was astonishing.

Shot over several weeks, the making of StoneLight was also a private and peaceful rite of passage. I’d hop in the car with some loose-fitting tracksuit on, find an empty cemetery, and see what scenes opened up for shooting. Out of respect for the dead, I always turned off the music as the car rolled into each cemetery – my small nod to the sacredness of the space. It may seem odd to grant that respect when in a few minutes I would shed the clothing and stand in the midst of all that quiet wearing nothing at all. In the service of the project – in this case an attempt to become one of the stone sculptures, frozen in time and space – it was necessary to be nude.

When God granted me entrance to this world, it was not in a three-piece tailored Tom Ford suit fit for an infant, it was naked as jaybird, wet and matted with the birth fluid of life. The debate will rage as to whether I’ve maintained any of that innocence, or simply exalted in original sin, but nudity has never been a bad thing in my mind, and here it reflected the natural wonder of the carved stone, and the elemental nature of the cemeteries themselves.

As I’ve mentioned, the StoneLight project was my first foray into a serious attempt at photography. I learned a lot, and had the freedom to experiment. There is a rawness to the work that I both love and cringe at, but it was the start of a long learning curve. This was also the work that got me my first solo photography exhibition, and subsequent managing duties at the Romaine Brooks Gallery, so it will always hold a special place in my heart.

STONELIGHT
Only in The Projects
Coming Soon…

It would be safe to assume that in these last hours before the launch of a new project there might be a frenzied last-minute promotional push, a final flourish capping a month (or more) of lead-ups, teases, and hints. But I will try to spare you all of that.

Here’s how it will play out. The project will be posted a few pages at a time, for the next week or so, in between which may (or likely may not) be brief intermittent blogging of the regular sort. If something worthwhile comes up I may interject, but otherwise I’d like the project to flow uninterrupted. After it has all been posted, I will file it neatly in The Projects page, where it can rub elbows with the likes of A 21st Century Renaissance: The Resurrection Tour 2010, The Circus Project, A Night at the Hotel Chelsea, etc., and thus will end the BARDO experience. We are almost there…

A rise, a submersion, of the dizzying heights and death-defying depths of a dream.

Swimming in the night, drowning in the moon, waiting for the sun to yank you from the wicked slumber.

It will pull you back in, and you will fall – sinking into the dim abyss, where you will be stripped of all worldly knowledge, set adrift amid floating bogs of peat, and from a thatched hut with a smoking chimney, you will ride the curling stairs of smoke, drifting skyward into the sooty ink ceiling of the world, and there, painted black, you will fall, charred embers crumbling in on each other, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dream-world to dream-world.

Your fire burns at the bottom of the sea, unquenched but fueled by the silt of ages, smothered by forked tongues of spiraling flames, bound to the ocean floor and tread upon by ghostly white crabs and translucent slugs.

All you ever wanted was to swim in the dark recesses of the night.

~ BARDO: The DREAM SURREAL ~

~ Beginning April 22, 2011 ~

~ Only on www.ALANILAGAN.com ~

A nightmarish claustrophobia, a swirling nightgown, an endless flight of stairs. The dream disconnects, and picks up somewhere else. A glowing candelabra, a wedding centuries old, a dusty album in the sun-bleached attic planks turning whispers of Miss Havisham.

The creak of a staircase, the thumping in the night, the drone of above and below. Flying buttresses in a starry sky, the stained glass window of your lover’s eye, and the sputtering, menacing furnace that glows in the dim corner of a basement – a small, tight space that never quite held your secrets.

Light the candles that will guide your way, along the corridors and book-lined walls of a long-forgotten dream. A bitter wind waits to blow them out as you make a birthday wish, and the crown you wear is made of paper, just sneaky cuts and hidden folds. We are ascending the descent, where dragon’s hair candy and the eyes of a pine await our arrival.

We are approaching BARDO…

The DREAM SURREAL

~ Online Premiere ~

~ April 22, 2011 ~

~ Good Friday ~

The Night is almost here…

Prepare for another weekend of endless promotional pieces for the new project, so if you are Bardo-ed out, please come back on Monday or Tuesday. The good news is that I am revealing the official release date of the project, so if you’re just waiting on that you can return then. As it is an online endeavor, it’s going to go on over several days, but the very first one to be posted will be on April 22, 2011 ~ Good Friday. Hey, if you’re going to go down, go down with the best of them.

~ BARDO: The DREAM SURREAL ~

~ The New Project by Alan Bennett Ilagan ~

~ Online Premiere Beginning April 22, 2011 ~

A Photographic Portfolio in Support of BARDO: The DREAM SURREAL

{FULL SET HERE.}

Excerpts from The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

“It was perceptible that he had already had glimpses of strange and subtile matters in those dark caverns, into which all men must descend, if they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of existence. And when they emerge, though dazzled and blinded by the first glare of daylight, they take truer and sadder views of life, forever afterwards.”

“I have heard a poet express similar distaste for his own most exquisite poems; and I am afraid that this final despair, and sense of shortcoming, must always be the reward and punishment for those who try to grapple with a great or beautiful idea. It only proves that you have been able to imagine things too high for mortal faculties to execute. The Idea leaves you an imperfect image of itself, which you at first mistake for the ethereal reality, but soon find that the latter has escaped out of your closest embrace.”

“The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day. He had hoped to mystify this anomalous creature between the Real and the Fantastic, in such a manner that the reader’s sympathies might be excited to a certain pleasurable degree…”

~ BARDO: The DREAM SURREAL ~

~ A New Project ~

~ COMING THIS MONTH ~