Zierle & Carter Installation

“If you don’t resist and you don’t fear, you will always come back up to the surface again” – written in red lipstick on her window

Two window installations
2 long stemmed white Candles
2 Wood chairs
Burnt toast covering the female head and the male head
Each in their own space

He knocked on his window again and again
Waiting for her to respond.
She held the flame up high. The single match that burns slowly
On her knees fingers curled against the window
His hands blackened by the burnt toast and blackened dinner plates
Stacks of white plates with single white candles
He stacked three of his blackened, burned white plates by the window.

“How can you get a little violence with the beauty”–comment from a witnessing performance artist

A man in a green jacket came to her window and lit a dollar bill and held it up to her window. His dog was with him and the man looked like his shoe had dog shit on it. I liked smelling the burnt smell of paper.

He knocks on the window again.

We, the audience are taking up the sidewalk space. People are going around us into the space as we colonize the sidewalk space in from of the gallery.

“What the fuck is that”- comment from a passing pedestrian

His hands shake as he lights the matches.
His hands shake as he knocks on the window

A piece of toast fell off his face that covered his left eye
He smashes the toast against the window- towards her window, not towards the street audience.
He wants to connect with her?
She faces him and lights another match from within her glass box

“Oh my god, last time there were naked women in their underwear”- comment from female teenager walking by with her group on sidewalk

His plates read:
“Is not dead”
“Below the surface”
“Maybe nothingness is better than pain”

Her plate read:
“Where did she bury it?”

He lights a match and holds it up to the toast to the window.
She stacks her burnt toast into a little house on the chair.

The candlelight burns on.

Photos by Isabelle McGuire

Esther Baker-Tarpaga is co-artistic director of Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project www.btdanceproject.com, which has performed at I Trotra Festival Madagascar, Jacobs Pillow Inside Out Festival, Kelly Strayhorn, REDCAT LA, Action Danse Morocco, Abok I NGoma Cameroon, and Dialogue De Corps Burkina Faso. She curates vlog www.shiftafrica.wordpress.com, featuring performance and interviews with African choreographers. She toured with David Rousseve/REALITY and has performed with Guillermo Gomez-Pena La Pocha Nostra and Hind Benali, Morocco. She has taught at OSU, UCLA, Atelier Aex Corps Senegal, and Cypress Community College. She is the recipient of a NY Live Arts Suitcase Fund, BETHA Grant, and was a State Dept. Cultural Envoy in Guinea, Botswana, and South Africa. She co-directs an annual dance/music workshop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.