Munson explores meditation
Artist aaron Munson is meditating for a month and you can join in
Widely admired as one of the calmest camera techs in the local cinematic ecosystem, filmmaker and artist aaron Munson has often sought out different scales of time and space than most of us even bother to fathom.
Starting Saturday, he's about to do it again, this time going big as a performance artist, endurance-meditating for an entire month into early October as a series of small sculptures repeatedly 3D print around him.
“I have no idea where my head is going to go,” Munson says with a laugh, “or who I'll be at the other end of it. But I do enjoy throwing myself into some potentially ... not dangerous, but extremely challenging situations and seeing what happens.”
Widening back to Munson's scales, the thoughtful cameraman has previously photographed near-microscopic moments of interacting fluids, enlarging them to outright buffalo sizes; and, using a high-speed camera, slowed down drive-by footage of Edmonton streets to a truly mesmerizing pace in his short, One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression.
One of his most profound and memorable artistic efforts, though, was Isachsen — a better-than-museum quality documentation of a long-abandoned remote weather station up north where his father once worked and started to lose his mind, now a frozen ghost base suspended in ice.
Utterly alone in the snow-covered ruins, Munson spent a week with only his thoughts and the sleepless wind for company — an early act of isolation.
That show at the now-dormant dc3 Art Projects — a gigantic parka hood was its entryway, obvious symbolism of going into the artist's head — won the 2019 Eldon + Anne Foote Prize worth $10,000, a mere sliver of the cost to travel north and produce the art.
It's thus fitting that in the same downtown space (now unused as a gallery for about two years), Munson is launching his new performative endurance project — Sit Still Take Notice.
From Sept. 4 to Oct. 3, he'll be mediating full-time, every day, inside a spotlit circle of six actively 3D-printing Buddha heads on plinths. By the end, he calculates, there will be about 2,000 of them produced, with at least a little irony in their production aimed at our treadmill, consumption culture.
“I don't want to say too much about them,” Munson says. “I'd rather people just read into that on their own.
“But I like the idea of mass-producing these symbols which carry so much spiritual weight.”
A pre-recorded, looping score by accomplished sound artist Gary James Joynes will accompany the work, with a live microphone amplifying the sound of the six printers. It all sounds a little like tabla percussion over the droning soundscape, creating its own sort of music.
How Munson ended up here began with his experience at a meditation retreat in southern Alberta two years back.
“You don't look or talk to anyone for 10 days,” he explains. “You eat two meals in the morning and just meditate for 11 hours.
“I kind of went into it a bit naive, thinking it would be an easier experience than it ended up being. A lot of things I thought I'd dealt with, moved on from emotionally, were clearly lying right under the surface.”
Munson has often made art by looking at depression and anxiety — including that short film mentioned, and the isolated revelations he felt collecting the material for Isachsen — but he obviously hadn't solved everything yet. Nor is he the type to insist he ever will.
Still, he's looking forward to walking back into himself.
“When you're in your head for that long, and connecting to your body, in a way your body remembers and things just kind of naturally rise up. And you're presented with the opportunity to kind of confront these fears or trauma and work through them.”
One of the show's main features is another self-imposed isolation, the pandemic's ongoing, come-here-go-away waves of social interaction naturally come up.
“For me, it brought attention to the fact you can view the last 18 months as a disruption, or you can view it as an opportunity to re-evaluate. And I think this project kind of builds on that,” he says. “This space was kind of forced upon us where we had more time to, say, spend with our families, or just kind of dial it back a bit in terms of this hectic, frantic schedule that is so many people's lives — mine included.
“And why do we do that?” he asks. “Is this just where we find ourselves? Or can we renegotiate it somehow and live at a different pace, observe the world in a different way and make space to be questioning our identities on an ongoing basis, where it's like, `Why am I doing the things I do? How am I living ?' It's creating space to just be more mindful and aware of who we are, where we're going.
“And if we're not, are we just at the mercy of the narrative imposed on us?”
Back to meditation as a general life practice, “People think it's a mystical, super spiritual thing,” he says. “And it's actually not. It's just like when we train our bodies in certain ways to do certain things we want.
“Why wouldn't we train our minds to be able to focus our attention in ways that are more helpful?”
One thing he's very clear about is that he's happy to have people come and watch, and even join in. Even if, he says with a laugh, it's for the entire duration.
“It would be amazing if someone just came and sat beside me the whole time. Imagine the conversations we wouldn't have!”