Games People Play
Second Full Moon of May, Jupiter and Venus make love in the sky, moon and planets line up for a dance macabre, I turn 7², and summer is upon us.
The show preparations
The reason to have an art show is so that people I love come from near and far to be there with me for it. Working together. The days before were full of the stuff that makes life worth living. I love hard, and I love being loved hard. Art is just a delivery system for connecting with the source of the reason for it all.
The show would not be what it is without the help of everyone who came to help put it up. My enormous thank you to the brilliant Tereza Swanda who curated everything and hung the trickiest parts, Ina Zhukovsky-Zilber who made invaluable suggestions, my brother Ben Rodny who made the best ever gift shop, Lentochka Rudman who made hanging the show a work of art in itself. Huge thank you to Yulia Dumov, I am grateful for you in all the ways. Lucy Barts you bring the wild to the side of good, and thank for testing out the chess set! Anna Kreslavskaya, thank you for making hammering letters into the wall look so sexy. Rachel Hammerman, thank you for always bringing wisdom and humor and managing the application of the wall text. Ilya Yacobson, thank you for bringing the wolf to the full moon. .
And of course this show would not be even a dream without the generous and wonderful Vladimir Zimakov wig just said to me, when I was thinking outloud about my art, “just have the show at Wedeman Gallery”. Thank you to you, to Katya, and to your family for just being there and your kindness and generousity.
The Reception
I was very excited and also rather dreading the opening reception because it’s a hundred conversations that get started and don’t get finished, seeing faces across the room and not being able to even say hello and at the end feeling like a barrel with a hundred gunshot holes in it all leaking slowly in search of some sort of closure. If you came to my art chow and we didn’t get to talk, or if we got to talk a little bit, please make a plan with me. I did have an entirely perfect ending to the event, those of you who were there, you made me feel like a legit OG Disney Princess.
The show
There are a few things more liberating than abandoning control after lengthy and careful preparation and letting things run wild. There are four pieces that weren’t finished and I decided not to rush them but to finish them for the closing. I am happy with the work that ended up on the walls, and the more I get to go back, show people around, and explain the different ideas and artworks, the more things click into place and narratives reveal themselves, I am very touched that people like seeing my art and I am also feeling a pull in some other creative directions now that this project is mostly over and that feels very exciting. I am going to work on a book of some sort that goes through the artworks thematically and hopefully it will be done by the closing. I am very grateful for the postcards, for the back and forth project and for the giftshop because those were the main three ways of pulling other artists into the fray and that feels amazing, knowing that I am not alone.
The wall text
Even though I had the title years ago, it took me a long time to figure out the words and the themes that frame the ideas. The texts below are important to navigate where I am coming from and where I am trying to go with my ideas. They are meant to be jumping off points.
Alisa Rodny
"Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play —
it arises in and as play, and never leaves it."— Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)
Games People Play is about the spaces governed by imagination. The work was made in conversation — with collaborators, with sources, with the people whose lives moved through this work.
The exhibition includes new work organized by theme. Among the works on view is the Back and Forth Game Project — a two-year game played with multiple partners, in which each participant in turn made art moves on the same shared space.
Civilization is play. Music is play. Art is play. Play is what moves every child who ever asked why the wolf has such big teeth, or whether a chicken could have four legs, or what lives in the space between two people who love each other.
Art takes these questions seriously. So does love. This show is an act of gratitude for both.
Games People Play
The Gameboard has four parts: Life as Game, The Journey, The Soul, and Family. These themes revealed themselves throughout the preparation for the show. Each body of work is shaped by the interaction of external influences and internal experience.
Life as a Game
"The condition is that I may live as long as I hold out against you."
— Antonius Block, The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
How do we find the moves to make? What are the rules we inherit? Who holds the light to the uncertainty that governs every turn?
The Journey
"These heroes must always live there where you and I have only been."
— Leonard Cohen, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes (1969)
Where do we come from? Where are we going? These are not questions with destinations. They are the journey itself.
These works follow figures in motion — carrying what they came with, moving toward something not yet visible. Home is never simply inherited. It is made, and remade, through the allies we find on the road and the communities we build across a lifetime.
The Soul
"How shall I hold my soul, that it may not be touching yours?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Love Song, New Poems (1907)
"What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world."
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Every encounter is a game of proximity. The soul does not stay contained — it reaches, resonates, burns. What one calls friction, another felt as inevitability. Two souls meet. Both are changed. The game was never on a board.
Family
"Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death."
— Song of Songs (8:6)
Family is not given. It is built — across distance, across generations, across shared experience. It is found on the road as much as at the table.
To belong to a family is to accept both its shelter and its burden. The bonds that hold us are the same bonds that mark us.
Collaboration with Dan Veksler
Art and Music
Thank you again dear Dan Veksler for contributing some of your creative genius to the art space. The music played from three locations, different takes on the Alice song from Vladimir Vysotsky’s musical record of Alice in Wonderland from our childhood. Here’s the wall text that never made it up on the wall written by Dan who doesn’t just require no intro, but doesn’t even require the sentiment that no intro is required!
Alisa (requires no intro):
Hey, old friend, I'm having an enormous show at a really special gallery that used to be a frat house. It's going to be utterly magical.
Dan (musician, translator):
That's amazing, old friend! I'm sure you'll turn that frat house into a Very Strange Place! Speaking of which, I've been working on this new project about the children's audioplay of Alice in Wonderland, with songs by Vysotsky, that is so meaningful to both you and me. That, too, promises to be quite a thing. I would love to share it with you, as you are in a unique position to appreciate it.
Alisa:
That would be the most wonderful thing in the world! We've known each other for over thirty-five years, and have never collaborated. How about if we make a small off-shoot that melds our two projects, and include it in the opening of my show, to help make it a Very Strange Place?
https://www.facebook.com/reel/994772586851268 check out a small video here!
Buttons
One of the items sold in the gift shop was a set of buttons.
The buttons are quite small and many people missed them, but in many respects they are, after the wall text, the second key to understanding the ideas behind the show.
The chicken chess piece logo. This image combines a chess piece disguised as a chicken. He could be a castle or he could be a knight. I feel like it adequately represents me and the show. A lot of my subconscious mind lives in another dimension that’s a bit like the Middle Ages and a lot of people’s activities are guided by extremely complex and surreal rules of engagement around the themes of love and death.
This is a phrase that lives in my mind at all times. It’s not about mindfulness or being present or spirituality or making the right decisions. And it is about all those things. It’s about the preciousness of the things that happened before that glow like horny lightning bugs on a warm June evening in the woods. Each thing is unique and will never repeat. You can try to repeat it, but it will be a different unique event. I know this is kind of basic and obvious, but it’s also the thing that makes life precious. It makes for very personal, very intense points of light that represent the moments of growth, revelation, pure joy, unexpected sadness. This is what guides my creative process; This is where I get my creativity and my strength.
This is what I like to say to people who are important to me instead of saying hello. A long time ago I formulated this idea that love and knowledge are a part of the same process. Aside from the biblical “knowing” of another, I think the desire to love is the same as the desire to explore, investigate and understand another’s mind, passions, ideas and processes. As we love something or someone deeper, we know them better. Love can be defined as a recognition of something familiar, intimate, same.
This is a line from a very famous song called The Kiss of Fire. You can ask me why, of all the songs and all the music that lives with me, I decided to put this line on a button pin. I will tell you. The creative process is love process. It’s banal and obvious but there is. You have to abandon your good judgement, your rationality, your caution, your safety. You have to leap into the fire. Making art is the same process as falling in love.
“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”. Song of Songs 6:3.
Much of my art is about the space, the energy, the power that is generated by connection between people, but also between people and ideas.
Here’s an example. I love Mozart. One of the first things I ever wrote as a kid was an essay about how much I love Mozart’s music. I feel a pure, giddy, child-ish delight when I engage with his music. There’s something that about the structure of his music that has the same wavelength as the structure of my love. It resonates.
E.T.A. Hoffmann loved Mozart. As a matter of fact, the “A” in his name stands for Amadeus, and he added it to his name as an adult. Hoffmann wrote the Nutcracker which is about love between children that saves the world.
Maurice Sendak loved Mozart and he loved Hoffmann. He made illustrations and designed sets and costumes for the Nutcracker ballet. He wrote children’s books and included four-legged chickens in his stories.
What does all this have to do with King Solomon? The line from Song of Songs is often included on Ketubas, Jewish marriage contracts.
The love between artists, across time, space, generations, death - that’s the marriage of ideas that births new art. The beloved is on one hand a spouse or a lover, but on another hand it’s the spiritual connection that is not limited to one other human, but is a part of the journey.
Which of course brings us to Rilke. He walked the edge of the abyss in his creative work where the electric tension is either harnessed into art or burns you. This idea that souls are live wires that explode when they touch is what makes life worth living.
Das Glasperlenspiel: Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht samt Knechts hinterlassenen Schriften.
We have a choice whether to keep the wire live or to wrap it in plastic. For artists it’s a matter of life and death. It’s not about success, or sex, or family, or perfection of craft. It’s about all those things.
We’re all mad here! This too is about the leap off the cliff. You can’t grow if you don’t fuck up. What is wisdom? How do we acquire it? How is it compatible with letting go? One day I hope to find out.
If you’re falling off a cliff you might as well try to fly.
Does God exist? I love so many of Woody Allen’s movies, but the one I come back to again and again are Crimes and Misdemeanors and Bullets over Broadway. In Crimes and Misdemeanors the Woody Allen character and his love interest hand out in his wonderful studio watching videos of an old philosophy professor talk about his ideas on life and love. Does an artist have a right to create his own moral universe?
In children’s books great artists and thinkers can explore the great unanswerable questions in spaces unburdened by philosophy and theology, morality and practicality. In my gallery library you will find a few picture books that take you to these very pure places of the origins what makes us human. My plan for a next project is to write a children’s book about Death. Stay tuned.
I am the wolf. My spirit guide. Connecting dreamworld with the real world. The wolf comes from my childhood, from fairy tales, from the archetypal character from across cultures and traditions. Since he showed up in my dream when I was about three until know he has been a constant presence in my thinking. Last year he turned into a character during a particular difficult time and became a part of my outward narrative providing a strength, and a vulnerability and a certain amount of undeniable sexy. Take two sevens and multiply them and that’s how old I am now, as of June 19. If the wolf was a soccer player his number would be 19.
Housekeeping
The art show is up and will up through End of September.
If you want to see it, call me, text me, email me and we make a plan
6178937770
klopus@gmail.com
