Note from the producer: this is the fifth episode of the third season of a series on WYSO called Studio Visit. This season, I focus on artists who regularly work with collaborators or have creative partners in their families who influence or participate in making art.
The featured artists will use various media, from photography to sculpture. Each segment will feature artist collaborators and include a brief biography, a sound-rich scene of a visit to their studio, and an interview about their work and how they connect creatively.
The Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running make videos that blend nature with mystical humor. The mostly Cincinnati-based artist collective comprises Lisa Siders Kenney, Denise Burge, and Jenny Ustick. Each artist has her unique creative practice, but together, they make art installations with video, sound, singing, and sculptural objects.
“The Maidens are characters that we created, and they're very, very romantically attached to the idea of nature." Burge says, "And then, in the spirit of absence makes the heart grow fonder, the further removed one is from the object of your desire, the more romance you get.”
In a recent project, the object of desire is the moon over the river. The Maidens star in a video they shot near a river called “Better Close Than Never.”
They composed a soundtrack and designed props, like fake river rocks made of plaster, covered with silver leaf for moonlight, and costumes, including hand-made jewelry and flowing tunics.
“Anything that would create the most vague and soft reminiscence of moon-ness or river-ness," Burge says. "And that would trigger what one might call euphoric recall, a feeling of what we call 'relaxion.'”
Relaxion is a kind of synthetic relaxation, the artists say. It’s the feeling of being soothed by the idea of nature but not real nature, and it’s a word the artists invented.
“It's a practice of ours to contract a lot of commonly used words, sometimes initially out of mistake or expediency,“ Upstick says.
Burge continues.
“Yeah, relaxation was a spelling mistake that one of us caught, and we were like, ‘Oh, we'd like that much better. It's easier to say,’ and the maidens are all about making things easy.”
“When we collaborate and are talking ideas, things that authentically make us laugh, get in," Siders Kenney, the third member of the maidens, says. "we have this frame that we are somewhat of a cult wanting to make the world a more romantic and beautiful place.”
Specifically, the maidens want to create that place through video.
"That idea of being mesmerized," Burge says. "The hypnotic, narcotic effect of looking at something on a screen.”
“Well, we were talking about video as a drug." Siders Kenney says, "We were seeing it as therapeutic, and we use the video as practically like massage or like the fire pit; there was one where the video was projected onto the viewer. So you became the screen. So it was bathing your body, and so it was like a treatment.”
For the Maidens, the art is in the dream of a more beautiful world, a dream maybe we all share, they say.
“We, the artist behind the maidens, laugh a lot at, I think, the naïveté and the feebleness. Upstick says, "Embedded in that is a search for comfort, peace, well-being, balance. But I think that's where the art is made, in the..pathos is the word I'm looking for...having some tenderness for the maidens because while we are not them, we are in them.”
