Our North Star, Polaris, remains an unwavering guide in the night sky. However, due to a phenomenon called Axial Precession, this guiding light has slowly, persistently changed over the millennia. When the Egyptians built the pyramids, Polaris was not the star over our north polar axis. and in the future, a new pole star will emerge, and then another, and another...

Enter Kappa Draconis: a star that is perfectly positioned to one day be our North Star, but alas, Kappa Draconis (also known as KD) will be outshined by two other, bigger, but less perfectly-positioned stars. Inspired by the “almost” of KD and the resilience we demonstrate to survive the “almosts” in our own lives, artists George Ferrandi, an internationally exhibiting artist based in Sunbury, Pa, and sTo Len, the official artist in residence at the New York Department of Sanitation, collaborated with local residents to bring to life the 12th Star Fire and Water Ceremony.

The multi-faceted project began at Sunbury’s Albright Center in May of 2023 with a community-engaging event that invited the local residents to share their stories about resilience, “Change of Course.” Co-hosted with Stories on Tap and CommUnity Zone, and emceed by performance artist Peterson Tuscano , the event informed the shape of The Twelfth Star Ceremony by infusing it with narratives rooted in the local experience.

The Sunbury River Festival, a beloved local tradition, provided an opportunity for The 12th Star artists to learn about the community’s relationship with the Susquehanna River. Since the festival couldn’t be at the river due to road construction, the artists brought the river to the festival via green screen on July 19th and 20th. Using river-themed sculptural prompts and prerecorded riverscapes, residents created video postcards that celebrated the spirit of the river and their connection to it.

The culminating ceremony took place along Sunbury’s Riverfront park on September 9th. In the late afternoon sun, a tiny but mighty regatta arrived, festooned with white silk flags to deliver to those gathered along the shore. (Using silk flags as the project’s central element is a tribute to the region’s history as a home to industrial silk mills.)

Carrying flags of symbolic surrender, participants set out on a downriver procession, harmonizing with a fire and water-themed chant they learned just prior to departure. Arriving at a station at the waterfront's end, they painted marks on the surface of the station tables in the colors of fire, acknowledging their personal experiences of loss and surrender. In a pivotal moment, participants then used their white flags to erase those marks, transforming the flags of surrender into symbols of fiery resilience.

Empowered by catharsis and community support, participants embarked on a celebratory homeward journey to adorn the regatta with the now fiery flags and send the boats on their return voyage, against the current.

The 12th Star Fire & Water Ceremony was made possible through the generous funding of MapFund, and through the support, skills and advocacy of: Peterson Tuscano, Glen Retief, Cindy Peltier, Julie Hagenbuch, Jody Ocker, Gidget Matuszewski, Viktoria Romania, Sam DeVries, Matt Wilson, Andrew Stuhl, Laura Libert, Daniel Nienhuis, SaraJane Snyder, Meghan Beck and Alexandra Zsigmond.

With particular thanks to the residents and city of Sunbury, Shikellamy State Park, George's Lovely Varietysubscribers, the Herman Family, Theresa and Todd Kendall, and Team Troisi: Nick, Carol, Rose, Mimi, John, Jessie, Aaron, Marlo, Jovian & Keil.

Photos by Keil Troisi with navigational assistance by Aaron Troisi.

Open Source Gallery presents maybe the sun, a multimedia exhibition by George Ferrandi

As we emerge from the pandemic, we are all living with unprocessed grief. We have grafted a thin skin of normalcy over our everyday lives, but our sense of loss continues to lie just below this delicate surface, leaving us less resilient to other challenges. maybe the sun offers an immersive framework for collective reflection on what we have lost and learned. This exhibition features drawings, sculpture, video and a recurring interactive live event: we are each other’s atmosphere, a collaborative tool for processing our un-commemorated losses and un-celebrated victories.

we are each other’s atmosphere evolved from conversations and consultations with grief counselor Shea Wingate, LCSW, and could be described as Mahjong meets guided meditation at a séance. Guests sign up in advance to participate in this gamified ritual conducted by Ferrandi for small groups. This intimate, interactive experience provides a cathartic structure for collectively orchestrating our conceptions of the pandemic, and reliving—with appropriate fanfare—moments of unseen victories and unrecognized accomplishments.

Drawings from the Receivers series aim to absorb and reflect viewers’ emotional experiences of the pandemic, in the way that objects often act as silent witnesses to our histories and repositories of our resonant moments.

In the video This World, Ferrandi visits the National Aquarium with her 90-year-old mother. The artist reads lines from a poem by Mary Oliver about the futility of looking for something in the natural world that isn’t special, as her mother struggles to repeat the lines, with her failed attempts demonstrating frustrating, hilarious, and charming truths.

Photos by Stefan Hagen.
Imminent Joy portraits by George Ferrandi.

It’s a lesser known fact that the North Star overhead when the pyramids were built is not the same star as current, Polaris. And in about a thousand years, a completely different star will be our Pole Star. Because of a slight wobble in the Earth’s rotation, the position is not fixed. Our “guiding light” changes.

For the last few years American artist George Ferrandi has been uniting scientists, musicians, artists and arts organizations to collaborate with communities around the country in the invention of an answer to the question:

How on Earth will we say goodbye to Polaris?

George is developing the interdisciplinary initiative Jump!Star so that communities can ritualize how future generations might say goodbye to Polaris and hello to our next pole star, Gamma Cephei. Jump!Star has been hosting a series of themed dream-storming performance sessions called “Constellates,” which focus on the changing North Star as a way to engage in thinking deeply about the future and creating cultural customs (songs, dances, food, regalia, ritual objects) to welcome it. This is important because, as adrienne maree brown articulates, “We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.” Jump!Star embraces that responsibility by fore-fronting the role of traditionally excluded people in the invention of future culture, and prioritizing their agency in the reclamation of the futurist narrative. 

At its core, the Jump!Star initiative is about recalibrating our relationship with time by asking us to think about it on a much longer scale than we usually do. It asks us to visualize the future and our aspirations for it, allowing us the possibility to reverse-engineer those hopes into active decisions we make today.

Visit jumpstar.love for more complete information about the initiative and the artists, musicians, scientists and communities involved.

Future North Stars is an online comic that uses Earth’s eventual North Stars as characters to address Covid-era existentialist questions, and the scrollable format of Instagram as a pacing structure for its narratives.

mediocre portraits of outstanding people was a series drawn live on the instagram account of the City Reliquary Museum in Brooklyn, while broadcasting interviews with the subjects. The drawings were made over the course of 12 Friday night sessions during the summer of 2020, with the intention of amplifying the words of powerful women of color.

Listen to the interviews here.

RANSOM 2 is an Instagram-specific collaborative exhibition presented by Wayfarers in Brooklyn, NY. Conceived and directed by artist and founder of Wayfarers George Ferrandi, RANSOM 2 features the work of almost 400 artists operating from a wide range of skill levels, and hailing from an equally wide range of geographical locations. Shirking the unspoken rule against “pay-to-play" exhibitions, RANSOM 2 playfully declared itself a pyramid scheme, and "demanded" that each participating artist pay a fee in exchange for the assignment of one word from a story by renowned poet, A.W. Strouse wrote for the occasion. (The funds generated by RANSOM 2 enabled artist-run Wayfarers to keep its studios running and doors open for the last six months, after many members’ income had been affected by COVID.)

I ride the NYC subway trains, usually in the evening when the seats are full. I focus on the shape of the space between the person sitting next to me and myself. I attempt to mentally and emotionally re-sculpt that space. In my mind, I reshape it- from the stiff and guarded space between strangers to the soft and yielding space between friends. I direct all my energy to this space between us. When the space palpably changes, and I completely feel like the stranger sitting next to me is my friend, I rest my head on that person's shoulder and see what happens...

You can watch a TED talk I gave about this project here.

All images are stills from IPhone video shot by Angela Gilland-Spiegel.

The Prosthetics of Joy is a live performance where the players, set and costumes are indivisible. During the performance, a photograph I found on Facebook is slowly reconstructed. The photo is of 40+ children at a bar mitzvah party dressed like serious adults, but in the midst of a unanimous and literal jump for joy.

In the re-enactment, adults, who are supported in their exact mid-jump positions by sculptural supports, play the children. The performance culminates in the moment when the scene onstage has unfolded into a precise but jury-rigged recreation of the original photo.

Acknowledgments: 

Made possible thanks to the support of the students, faculty and staff at the University of Alabama, especially Lauren Lake, John Fields, Stacey Holloway, Doug Boulos, Gary Chapman, and Sir Jared Ragland.
Plus Rob Clifton, Matt Apker, Lucy Allen, John V., Jacob and Mermer.

Assistant Direction and general life-saving techniques by John Orth.
Live musical ingenuity by Armand Margjeka.

Sponsored in part by the John S. Jemison Fund, College of Arts & Sciences & the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
  
Original photo courtesy of Cynthia Wolberger by way of Lisa Ferrandi.
Re-enactment shot taken by Jared Ragland.
Video documentation by Ryan A. Meyer.
Research Assistance by Jacob Ferrandi.
Technical Consultation by David “Scout” McQueen.

Additional support provided by Keil Troisi. And Santo. 

I set out to design an inventive project at Wayfarers that could incorporate the range of skills and approaches an open call for entries would generate, as well as acknowledge the fact that we were going to demand money (which would be necessary to cover our administrative costs, but still made us uncomfortable). We developed the idea for Ransom - a group show that was open to absolutely anyone who paid the ten bucks for the submission fee. We spread the word about the show and 275 artists from all over the world committed to participate. Based on that number, we wrote a True Story with *275 words, and assigned one word to each of the artists. They were to make their words out of virtually any material and then send them to us so that we could arrange them on the walls of the gallery to spell out the True Story in the style of a giant, three-dimensional ransom note.

*A real life fact changed in the True Story, so we added a footnote, and recruited more word-makers. Then another fact changed (real life is slippery), and we recruited more word-makers for that footnote. The current word count for Ransom is 329 and holding. The story, as of this writing, is still true...

Wayfarers is a studio program and gallery I've been developing in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. I think of it as a "Curatorial Collaborative." These are projects in which I invite participants to work with me based on some specific qualities that they bring to the table. These co-conspirators aren’t just executing my vision for the project; the project is developed with their contributions in mind, but unified by my aesthetic and/or by my overarching narrative or premise. They are different from pure collaborations, because they aren't so democratic, and different from pure curations, because my role is usually still very much that of maker. They involve a type a vision designed to embrace and incorporate many generous and talented hands and voices.

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When my dad was dying, he asked for a blanket. The VA hospital in Baltimore didn’t have any more. I spent the next few years futilely trying to address the tragic helplessness of that moment through my work. In this piece, I used the box of my dad’s clothes that my mom didn’t know what to do with, and made a quilt that recreated a photo of him with his army buddies just before they went off to fight the battle of Peleliu.

The work in Unsung acknowledges the current international socio-political climate and its paradigm shifts. These pieces incorporate imagery associated with grass roots revolution - toppled statues, felled saints, stacked ammunition and rebel crowds. The physical violence of uprising is relegated safely to the realm of metaphor in these pieces, but their general uneasiness still speaks to a simmering volatility.

Cloud Seeding Circus was a touring performance project produced collaboratively by ten visual artists. A mobile installation, exhibition space and vehicle for performance, the compact caravan lumbered into unsuspecting towns and anticipating art venues, unpacking its wares in the spirit of the best bell-laden gypsies. Drawing inspiration from the lush traditions of buskers, freak shows, and rodeos, CSC operated within the equally compelling traditions of sculpture, video, installation, and performance art. 

Cloud Seeding attempted to be Art all the way down. Admission tickets and posters were editioned prints; the elephant was collapsible; the balloon man was an image to behold. Viewers experienced all the magic and mystery of the traditional circus, re-contextualized to anticipate the skepticism of the 21st century. Vignettes referencing historic circus acts conjured them up as metaphors for contemporary issues. The overall performance was self-reflective, exploring the region between backstage and center. 

Cloud Seeding Circus toured from 1999-2002. Collaborating artists included Mindy Abovitz, Jesse James Arnold, Kelie Bowman, Alan Calpe, Brody Condon, Leslie Harding, Will Heath, Dave Herman, Stephanie Hutin, Christy Gast, David McQueen, John Orth and myself. 

Cloud Seeding Circus is featured in Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of Circus Arts by J. Dee Hill, published by Soft Skull Press.