Living Love Revolution Sacred Sexuality Presentations
The July series of salons and workshops have stirred up a lot in me. Creating the series in conjunction with my art has been a profound experience on many levels. I was thrilled to present Return of the Divine Feminine with Nekole Shapiro of Tantric Birth and Veronica Monet. The talk was about a great many things including re-connecting our inner Madonna Whore and eradicating the Virgin/mother/whore/Slut split between women. It was lovely and the first hour will be available for free and the next two hours will be for a fee embedded in our websites. The three of us are going to teach this again in San Francisco.
Declaration of the Divine Other was a delicious exploration of mystery with an intense and spacious group of 7 who showed up. I am so looking forward to next week’s talk with Lance DeMuth who’s driving back from Portland with me. I am here in Portland now (Fri July 22nd) preparing for the Temple of Unfolding. The first exported Aphrodite Temple that is being produced with very little input from me by people who trained with me to do similar work. Hooray!
Opening the Vault of Heaven : 30 Sacred Whores
July 2011 30/30/30 Show at Avanti Art & Design
If you live in Seattle Go See It! Avanti is open Tues-Sat 11am-6pm (206) 784-8475
Teri Ciacchi’s Artist Statement
“Welcome to my Multiverse where all beings are animate; Mushrooms connect us; bees pollinate us and Starlight magnetizes us with desire. In this realm the Body is Holy, Sex is Sacred and Lust is an offering to Deity. This work is a tribute to all my amazing friends mentors and peers who do the inner work of eating their shadow selves and becoming integrated holistic beings so that they can hold space for others and provide deep healing. Each piece in an honoring of them and a spell for the empowerment of their work. From July 5th- August 2nd members of the Living Love Revolution will be teaching classes on the path of Sacred Sexuality. Welcome to a Living Love Revolution!”
Click for larger version.
L to R: Dakini Star Power $80, Astarte/Qetesh “Grasses Leapt Up in Her Step” $100, Swing Daddy $75.
All by Teri Ciacchi © 2011
What I Did on My Summer Art Vacation
I spent hundreds of hours working on my Installation and the 30 individual pieces for This art show and I loved it. I worked solidly on the art for 8 days in the middle and end of June and I am proud of the results. The public celebration of my Aug 1st 49th Birthday will happen on Friday July 29th from 8-10pm at Avanti where I will tell the story of how and why I made these works and installed them. You can view a trailer of the show here or learn more about the Avanti Insider Event.
I owe Gary Jacobsen a great debt in his willingness to let me turn our dining room into an art studio and his patient support of my process. I owe Leela Pastala a great debt in that she stayed with me for 5 hours to hang the installation in the Gallery. Leela’s physical abilities and willingness to get up and down a ladder repeatedly made it possible for me to have the lights, various fabrics and ritual objects placed in the exact way I wanted to honor the stardust, bees and mycelium aspects of the piece. In fact Leela has been an indispensable part of the Living Love Revolution community as she quietly and persistently shows up to support me and help compensate for both my physical limitations and emotional fragility. Thank You dear sister for all of your selfless service.
On Aug 3rd I will take the work down. If you are featured in a piece I will give you the first option of owning the piece if it did not sell during the show. If you are featured in the piece and cannot afford to buy it, I will give you a free photo card of the work. All people featured will also receive the password to the private exclusive video I made talking about why you were included in the work, what I saw and was attempting to express. Contact me and I will send you the password after August 1st. I created this password process after a lot of contemplation as I wish to keep your confidential info confidential.
Avanti Art & Design is a Community Resource
My friend Wendy Keen owns and operates an Art Gallery called Avanti Art & Design at 7317 Greenwood Avenue. My friend Emmalee Bozak Maynard has been Wendy’s business partner and co-worker for several years. I love them both and I deeply appreciate the many ways they have supported me in more deeply sourcing my own artistry. Wendy and Emily create a space where artists can be completely expressed and have an accessible public space to show their works. The artist cooperative supports more than 100 artists a year in having shows at the gallery. The show openings ar ethe 2nd Friday of every month as part of the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge “Art Up!” Walk. To see my reveiw of the artist collective experience go to Yelp. you will also see a series of photos from Wendy restoring art for me. Wendy showed me how to clean and repair some of my housemate Gary’s 40+ year old rock chip art that he inherited from his mother and did not know how to clean and display.
Wendy and Emmalee have personally framed over 10 pieces of my own art some of which I will display here:
Personal Breakthroughs
I finished my video of June 19’s Seattle Slut Walk featuring Tara Hardy. Click here to view the video!
I recently reconnected with Aiden Key and want to remind everyone of his brilliant healing work around gender! go to Gender Odyssey Aug 5 & 6 and his new website GenderDiversity.org for resources for families and practitioners.
Allena Gabosch finished her chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. I am attending an event called Allena’s Kicked Cancer’s Ass Tiara party on August 6th.
Here is the piece “Babalon Kicks Ass” That I made for her in my 30/30/30 show:
Upcoming Media
On my Birthday August 1st I will upload the video I am making of this art piece on my YouTube channel.
Megan Guppy is helping me edit the podcasts I’ve been collecting for my sex talk radio show. So look for the talk Return of the Divine Feminine featuring my Nekole Shapiro and Veronica Monet before the end of August!
Outside Media
I was pretty busy making my own media this month which as you can see has been stepped up a notch again as I learn to make videos. I want to thank my lover “Mojo” for introducing me to a mutli-media app called “What’s App” which compelled me to learn how to make daily 45 sec videos and sneakily got me comfy with the format. I quickly realized that 45 sec videos were easily adapted to slightly longer films.
Movies:
“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” by Werner Herzog
Click here to view the trailer
Leela and I spent an afternoon wrapped in the spell of a 3-D viewing of this movie. Herzog takes the audience inside an archeological site Chauvet Caves in the South of France where images of ancient bison and other animals were expressively drawn by human ancestors dated to 32,000 years ago. I found it absolutely fascinating and deeply enjoyed the interviews with the people who are studying the cave and working to understand the history of human consciousness it represents. My favorite revelation in the film is a “hidden” image drawn on the backside of a stalagtite. A mirror on a stick revealed a bison humping a yoni/womb image. It is also fascinating to note that the earlier images are both larger and more realistic in their representation and that dating methods show that later humans added work in layer that became progressively smaller and less artistically accurate. Now what does that mean. Due to the fragility of its environment, the cave is only available to a select group of scientists for a few weeks every year. For me this movie is a great example of the right use of power and priviledge; a man using his reputation to create media that brings very restricted materials to the widest possible audience. I felt a lot of gratitude and wonder. I want to thank my friend Melanie Henry whose post on facebook brought this movie to my attention.
“Bridesmaids”
Click here to view the trailer
Carrie Lanza and I impulsively saw the film “Bridesmaids” one hot afternoon and I have to say it was a lot of fun! I enjoyed the nerd core focus of the main character and her love interests being thoughtful smart emotionally sensitive and neurotic people. I found these characters much more realistic than what I am used to seeing. I also noted that the content of the movie showed evidence of what Veronica Monet calls the “pornification” of mainstream culture. Bridemaids had a lot more explicit references to sex than I recall seeing in other mainstream movies such as: On screen kissing between two married women who we are later led to believe have an ongoing same sex relationship, women openly & directly soliciting sex from men in public (on an airplane) as well as private contexts, language and gestures that are from the BDSM subculture, a main character who openly has sex with multiple partners without apologizing. Unfortunately the movie does nothing to help its characters deepen their understanding of the healing aspects of sex and has a “business as usual” collapse around gender essentialist roles. No one questions whether or not marriage is a good thing. Getting married is the “Grand Prize” everyone wants in on even though the women who have been married for some time are clearly not sexually fulfilled or emotionally satisfied.
This movie also has a lot of class consciousness and oddly is on the side of the less monied less glamorous people. Clearly a sign of the economic downswing. The movie did share some of the women to woman support and directly addressed jealousy envy and territoriality. There was meaningful portrayal of psychological constructs around these issues and you got to see two women who were competing for best friend status team up in mutual compassion beyond the usually fixed and unresolved shadow triangulation of the victim, helper, perpetrator complex.
Books & Articles
National Geographic: Göbekli Tepe
Mycellium Running by Paul Stamets’ of Fungi Perfect fame
The Buzz about Bees by Jurgen Tautz
This book about Bees as a Superorganism is one of the the sources of Micheal Thiele’s understanding of the Bein
I continue to research my interest in Yeshe Tsogyel by studing Maching Lapdrom and Tsultrim Allione
Women of Wisdom by Tsultrim Allione
Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione
You can find the 5 step condensed version of the feeding your demons process on her own website here.
Music:
I’m on another Joni Mitchell jag and find myself listening compulsively to her album Hejira over and over again these days click here to listen.
Also listening to Shawn Mullins’ “Light You Up,” Damien Rice and old Art Sluts music that Ann Wood digitalized for us a couple years ago from the original cassette taped archives we produced while in the band from 1984-1986.