Lipshaw Arts: Miscellany

Living Thing #2, 2011. Used Insulin Syringes.

Bilongo, 2011. Wood and Used Insulin Syringes.

The syringes which I've inserted into the statue have already been inside my body-- they delivered the medicine which keeps me healthy, and thus they contain on their tips particles of my skin and blood along with traces of that medicine. An mpungu, like a body, must be cared for and maintained or it can die, lose its spirit. I give my medicine and my blood to the statue in order to note and memorialize the fact that every day I make the choice to continue to care for my body and my spirit, a choice most people are never confronted with but which I feel lets me revel in my life and in the world in a way that people who never examine the failing of their bodies perhaps cannot.

Electronica

Atonal Music Box, 2011.

(Atonal Melody composed by Eric Tran)

Cacophone 2.0, 2011. Personal Noise Generator

Cacophone, 2011. Personal Noise Generator.

Cacophone is a mini-synthesizer which only projects to the listener, as the sound is created point blank in the headphones, an electrical signal that travels directly to the brain without ever existing as a physical wave moving through space. Music is created ephemerally and intimately, only for the wearer of the headphones, and is effectively unrecordable and untransmittable.


Anti-Voodoo Doll, 2011. Plush with interior circuitry.

Anti-Voodoo Doll is a ritual object which protects itself from Petro Lemba. The interior wiring which lights the eyes shocks anyone who sticks a conductive pin inside. The magician can still inflict a curse, but only at a price to him or herself.