FOREST BATHING

I love forests. I always have. I grew up in one. Well, not literally but in close proximity and spent lots of time there. From my playground the Polish Masuria forest, through the Japanese Bamboo forest, the Amazon, to the Adirondack Mountains forest, and the North Pacific – they are all a wonder.

All this time, I didn’t know I was practicing shinrin-yoku known in English as forest bathing. I learned this last year when I stumbled across Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness by Dr. Qing Li.

My last forest adventure was this summer in Poland in the Baltic Sea peninsula of Hel. I still remember the dry smell of pine trees and heather in the heat, the carpet of pine needles under the feet, a thousand of small pine cones covering the forest floor. Some ferns here and there, last blueberries of the summer, sun filtering through the branches. The forest eventually gives way to the dunes and there are wild roses on the edges.

Recently I came across and looking forward to reading Marcelo Gleiser’s The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything.” Gleiser wrote a short piece about the very subject of forest bathing for NPR. He mentions the philosopher Alan Watts whose words resonate deeply “You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”

Above: The dune house we stayed at in Hel.

Above: Standing at the edge of the woods where the trees transition into grasses.


MORGAN O’HARA: LIVE TRANSMISSION, ON STAGE

The inaugural exhibition of Magdalena Keck Gallery ,“Morgan O’Hara: LIVE TRANSMISSION, ON STAGE,” opened at Roll & Hill at 3 Mercer Street in New York City on November 29, 2018 and has been extended from its original end date of February 21 to May 13, 2019 due to its popularity.

The established artist Morgan O’Hara began her series titled LIVE TRANSMISSIONS in 1981. Nearly 4,000 drawings have been made to date and all of them represent a recording by the artist of movement of live beings. This current exhibition, curated by Magdalena Keck, features drawings that capture the human movement of music, art, and dance performances recorded in real time by O’Hara using multiple graphite pencils at the same time. A line of text along the bottom of each drawing includes the date, location, and the performer, which becomes the title of the artwork itself as each piece represents a specific moment in time.

O’Hara received the prestigious Lee Krasner Award for a lifetime of artistic achievement in 2018 and her works are in the permanent collections of The British Museum in London, The National Gallery in Washington D.C., and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the summer of 2018, a short film was produced documenting the artist creating three LIVE TRANSMISSION works in Venice, Italy.

In the beginning of 2019, Brick & Wonder published a personal account that describes the inspiration and motivation behind the creation of Magdalena Keck Gallery: “From the Interior Designer: Launching an Art Gallery that Won’t Stay Put.”

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Above left: detail from “LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of musicians FLYN VAN HEMMEN percussion / BEN GERSTEIN trombone / GIAN-LUIGI DIANA laptop / Spectrum / New York / 2 July 2013”
Above right: Installation at Roll & Hill.

Photography: Jeff Cate
Film: Damien Neva


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