A Room with a View: Susan Kleinberg on her isolation experience

"A Room with a View" is a new editorial initiative which aims to illuminate the positive and creative potential of time spent in isolation. The fourteenth contribution comes from American artist Susan Kleinberg

Words by Susan Kleinberg

Dear My Art Guides Readers,

With my very best,

Through my “Room” what perhaps most strikes me is how touching everything seems. There it is, and there it is through the looking glass; its weight sometimes proportional to its emotional connection, sometimes just its weight.

And irony vanquished, which seems now like a vanquished friend, no matter where you stood in support or negation of its scale previously.

Of course it’s about time, not the kind of ever continual present Hopi time in which I grew up, but a lifted, kind of limbic time~ in your body, out of your body. Grateful moments, incredibly grateful moments, caught between fear, doubt, and sparkling crystalline flashes of joy.

And then making something with it~

Or just being glad to hear from a friend who actually seems to care about you.

It’s enough.

Though we’re not a group who embraces enough…

So hell no!

Leap!

Video link – https://vimeo.com/412080622

April 2020 (1 min 30 sec.)

This piece began with my happiness at hearing the rumor of the dolphins in Venice, albeit untrue; the goal to construct a leap in every way, as we go forward, how we go forward, how we must question – the energy, the joy, the possibility of a leap. The footage in the first segment is actual, then a leap!, an offer of a moment of wonder.

My best viewing recommendation is a beautiful film, “LIGO”, about the Nobel Prize winning detection of a new way to see the universe.

Vast perspective helps!

link: https://vimeo.com/397284387 *

Hang in,

Susan

* the soundtrack is John Cage’s “Sounds of Venice, 1959”, Susan was Cage’s student

Still from video piece "Leap!", 2020, courtesy of the artist

Balafre, 2017, prints, drawings, video. Courtesy of the artist