These entryways reveal an experience of merging into (and emerging from) the natural variances of earthen matter as they present the opportunity for a profoundly lasting and transformational, human and nature gnosis.

The black hole, first through performance, is an invited partner, a reciprocating, co-creative work-place and image, addressing the themes of participation mystique, the alchemical implications of sol niger (black light), perception, and the intersubjective phenomenon. Using movement (soma), sculpture made of natural materials (nature), and written reverie (psyche), the black hole will be viewed from imaginal, mytho-poetic, and depth psychological perspectives, demonstrating the affect of deepening interactions between human and natural psyches.

If observed from an intersubjective point of view, the environmental artist has a unique opportunity to understand directly the phrase Tat Tvam Asi. It is in this co-creative exploration, using the experience of psychological despair and renewal, that one might perceive matter as possessing an autonomous psyche. Throughout both parts of the presentation, a relationship will be developed that speaks to the latent ecological unconscious striving to be made conscious. This dialogue will finally look for unseen ethical imperatives perhaps revealed when nature is known as a more-than-human psyche in search of mutual relationship with its human neighbor. In the deepest ecotonal places between Self and Other, here framed by the image of the consuming black hole, artist, audience, and artwork will face together those very non-imaginal, environmental threats to a human and more-than-human marriage, and yet too an emerging glimpse and promise of vitality seen in the light of darkness.

"The Greening of Black: Merging and Emerging Within an Intersubjectivity of Environmental Artist, Art-work, and Place"

Gabrielle Milanich

“Tat tvam asi,” an unknown being whispers. Thou art that. Two seemingly different entities have entered into exchange: one, a human being, the other, a black hole woven of stone, branch, and leaf. Spoken in sotto voce, they hear a suggestion of intuitive knowing and yet each holds to her or itself a lingering question: Who is Agent and who is Created?

This exploration, through self-revelatory performance and exegesis, searches for one of many answers to this mutual query. By peering into the potential of the environmental artist, between the play of notitia and creating, to body forth the imagination into material reality, the black hole (as both cosmological event and symbol) becomes a portal into the ways in which the human and more-than-human world mingle in fields of simultaneity—fields both transcendent and immanent—seeking for ways toward grounding a wholly available eco-cosmological experience of  participation mystique.