My Response to an Ancient Call

The Lightforms Art Center exhibition entitled Ancient Future which showcased just some of the collected works of venerated artist Walter Gurbo was accompanied by the atmospheric, moody dance tunes of The Red Thread and made for a heady, deeply stirring multi-media experience.  From the moment of lift-off, the powerful, and yet, at times, delicate and ethereal voice of guitarist and singer, Jonah Byrd mixing and moving in perfect pitch with the call and response electricity of mix-master Jordan Walker and daughter-father duo Celandine Tribble and Taylor Tribble on percussive sounds, found us born aloft and held, drifting through space and time in a meditative trance which begged for us to relieve our burdens on the waves of sounds, leave them, for just this moment and move our bodies.

Feeling the call of the ancestral voices trapped in the steel drum and transported in electric waves and poured out over everyone in the space like a sacrament, the fluidity of the sound perfectly accented the rooms filled with the works of Mr. Gurbo; which were also brought to us a shadowy forms behind a filmy white curtain which hung and moved in the air currents.

Figures floating in just-barely-there, watery color were moved by the hands of the artist and the assistant children, who had the mystery characters bite and chop, sway and dance, twist and turn in time to the music.  Two rooms filled with abstract, layered works created over a span of years in a variety of materials told a story of pain and confusion, joy and clarity as we surveyed images of forced quarantine, the loss of friendship, refuge in wit and art and newly formed communities.

Many of the artistic works were perfectly complemented by the music being played in that they were without exact form, but nonetheless, created the talk of lived experience, accessible to the viewer as a familiar landscape.  The feeling that I understood, that I knew what he meant, even if it might be just out of my reach to describe what I was thinking, was strong.  I felt like the ah-ha! Was there, like a just barely remembered dream which would come to me if I could just quite my mind.  Fortunately, the music provided exactly the opportunity to do that.  The soundtrack swept away the chatter of my always “on” mind, allowing me to absorb and ferment what I had seen, bringing forth ideas and images of my own which were created through the duality of sight and sound melding in the night in that gallery space.  The pairing of these two different mediums was a genius idea that should be explored more.  Who knows what else we might ferment in this incredible community?