Lindsay Parnell
residency location | richmond, us
AIR May 19-25, 2020
AIR May 19-25, 2020
Scores for Being Home
Created during the Covid-19 pandemic, on week ten of quarantine.
Scores written by Lindsay Parnell
Foreword
While in quarantine, household tasks have become more and more noticeable, mundane and quite frankly, boring. I find myself reluctant to wipe the countertops down, yet again, even though it’s more important than ever to maintain a clean living space. There’s a mental motivation process that must happen before I’m able to repeat the daily process of taking the recycling or trash out. Our household shares trash cans with the block, and so because of the potential virus exposure, the hand washing ritual begins as soon as I return inside. I am currently living with three roommates (two of which are high-risk), my partner, three cats and too many plants to count. It’s never been more important for me to think collectively rather than individually, since my every action affects four other humans, and probably more. The collective trauma that we’ve endured throughout this time and the exhaustion that comes along with that makes a task such as vacuuming, well, daunting.
I’m also painfully aware that some people are living alone in quarantine, or living in uncomfortable or dangerous situations. I feel so extremely lucky to be living with four people who I love and who love me, as crowded as it may seem sometimes. It feels strange and pointless to be making art right now, even though I know that difficult times are when artists go to work. I hope that these scores will allow you to be playful, take some time, take some space, take whatever it is you might need to be able to put your dishes away—I know it’s a lot right now.
About the Artists
Lindsay Parnell is a performance artist with a background in sculpture and dance. They create visual cycles that investigate societies use of movement and how shared experiences of moving can develop a deeper empathy between bodies. They’ve participated in artist residencies such as SOMA Summer (Mexico City, Mexico), Saari (Mynämäki, Finland) and Atlantic Center for the Arts. At residencies, Lindsay participates in score writing as a key part of their process.
“I write my scores in a way that allows the performer(s) to determine how their movements and actions develop throughout the process. They are granted a level of agency over their bodies and the score in this way. I deeply commit myself toward prioritizing humanity over materiality throughout my work.”
During the pandemic, Lindsay has been writing performance scores for making household chores more pleasurable while focusing on their health through: daily jogs or bike rides, cooking for their four roommates, starting a garden, and cuddling with Millie, Texie and Little Boy (the cats).
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Llio Zogra received their BFA in Studio Art at New York University. Upon graduating, Llio became a Fellow and then a Technical Specialist in the Visual Art Department at NYU Abu Dhabi. At NYUAD, Llio founded and directed The Cube gallery on campus. When LLio returned to the United States, they became the Community Ambassador Manager and then the Exhibitions Coordinator at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts. With goals of teaching in higher education, they are currently in the process of obtaining an MFA in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Llio’s first solo show, Night Light, took place in the NYU Abu Dhabi Project Room and was written up by Electra Street. Floral Furnace, Llio’s third solo show, took place at Kalerie s čupr uměním Saigon and was written up by Studium Artium Magazin. Llio has been an artist-in-residence at DeLiceiras 18, an exhibiting artist at the Water Tower Art Festival, a studio artist at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, and has been invited to be an artist-in-residence at Fish Factory Creative Centre of Stöðvarfjörður this coming year. Currently, Llio is an artist-in-resident at Temporary.Show.
In the spring of 2020, Llio began producing experimental spoken word music, prolifically. They released Lullabies EP, Calliope Eclipses EP, and with tender indifference, | Act One all within the season. Currently, Llio is working on a collaboration with Eric Capper in which they are composing a visual album for with tender indifference, which is an oral translation of the diary they kept while living in the room of leaves. The footage, which acts as the visuals, was shot over the last six years and documents Llio’s journey of pre, during, and post diagnosis of Bipolar One Disorder.
Llio’s community projects consist of Holly and The Neighbors and Black Widow Books. Rooted in the city of Chicago, Holly and The Neighbors catalyzes creative support networks on a citywide scale. Global in mindset, Black Widow Books is a publishing house and remote residency program that serves artists from every inhabitable continent. Through directing these two projects, Llio is able to spread the importance of art and accessible education.
Contents
Dance with Your Dishes: A Score for Putting the Dishes Away
Bubble Time: Steps for Washing your Hands
Making Things Disappear: Ways to Choreograph a Dance With Your Vacuum
Using the Wall as A Partner
How to Give A Giraffe Hug
Tips for Throwing an Online Dance Party
Embodying a Florist: A Score for Listening to the News
Dance with Your Dishes: A Score for Putting the Dishes Away
Dance with your dishes.
Some of them might have grooves, some of them might be slick, some of them might have a rough edge or a chip in the corner.
Some of them might be sharp or bendy or still warm from the washing.
Create movements that mimic the shape of your dish as you transport it to its home.
Mimic the texture of the dish through the tempo of your movement.
Can you make sound with the dishes in some way?
(handblown glass by Gracie Whiteside)
Bubble Time: Steps for Washing your Hands
Step one: Get your hands wet.
Step two: Apply a soap that’s known (by you) for it’s bubbles / suds. Choose a soap in the house that you enjoy the scent of.
Step three: Lather your hands in the soap, creating bubbles in your palms.
Step four: Evenly distribute the bubbles on one of your palms to create a white board.
Step five: Use your pointer finger of the non-white board hand to write the first letter of your name in cursive.
Step six: Continue tracing the letter until there are no bubbles and you see your skin shining through the suds.
Step seven: Repeat steps four, five and six until you’re done.
Step eight: Lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds.*
Step nine: Rinse and dry your hands.
Step ten: Take another look at the palm that was used as a white board. Can you still see the cursive letter(s)?
*Step eight written by Center for Disease Control and Prevention When and How to Wash Your Hands
Making Things Disappear: Ways to Choreograph a Dance With Your Vacuum
Choose your own adventure:
Vacuum with the opposite hand than you normally would.
Use the vacuum as a dance partner as you make your way through the room.
Lay down on the ground and push the vacuum with your feet.
Create patterns in the rug with your vacuum strokes. You’re a painter now.
Make a song rhythm with the vibrating sound of the vacuum.
How long can you stretch your body across the area rug while vacuuming?
How short of strokes can you create while vacuuming?
Change the way you’re facing each stroke of vacuuming.
“It’s a full ‘I am God’ moment where I can make things disappear.” –Hobbes Baya
Using the Wall as A Partner
Find a space with an empty wall that you can safely touch.
Begin by standing at an arm's length distance away from the wall.
Take a few breaths while looking at the wall and noticing any patterns, shapes or textures to be aware of.
Put both hands out towards the wall.
Feel the wall with your palms. Step or lean forward if you need to.
Begin to shift your weight into the wall. Bend your elbows if you feel safe and comfortable doing so.
Experiment with shifting your hands around, giving different variations of your weight to the wall.
When ready, allow the weight shifting to extend to other parts of your body, besides your hands.
How to Give A Giraffe Hug
To be done simultaneously by you and a partner (or something large and fluffy if quarantining alone).
Stand chest to chest with your partner.
Lean your head forward so that your chin hooks overtop of your partner’s shoulder.
Slowly rotate your head towards them so that your chin is hooked around the back of their neck.
Soften your gaze and breathe into this position once you feel safe and settled.
Variation: close your eyes instead of softening your gaze
Note: Giraffes don’t actually use their necks for hugging in this way. Rather, male giraffes use “necking” to establish dominance amongst other male giraffes. This supposedly leads to greater reproductive success.
Source: Winning by a Neck: Sexual Selection in the Evolution of Giraffe
Tips for Throwing an Online Dance Party
I LOVE to dance. Dancing is like sex. You can learn a lot about your body—what feels good, what doesn’t feel good. There are different experiments with tempo and positions. And there can be surprises. Like when you move in a type of way that you didn’t know you could or you just, straight up, fall down. When my housemates and I started quarantine in March, I had been going out dancing at least twice a week for the eight months prior. I decided to throw digital dance parties as a way to maintain this pattern in my life that brought so much joy, and also, as a way to connect with folks through an activity that might be more absent in our lives than usual - partying.
Here are some of the tools I used to make this happen weekly on Saturdays for the first two months of quarantine.
Video method: Zoom
Considerations: Only the pro version (about $15/month) allows you to have a meeting over 40 minutes. Consider asking someone who works for a company or institution that already pays for it to create a recurring meeting for you and add you as a host.
Sound method: watch2gether
Considerations: +PLUS is their membership program that costs $3.49/month to be a part of and it’s totally worth it IMO. You can save a room that you invite folks into, then you control the playlist - so they’re listening to what you’re listening to. Can also create/save different playlists for each party. Very community oriented feel.
Link distribution: Linktr.ee
Considerations: Allows you to add multiple links to one site. So one link might say ‘watch the rest of us dancin queens’ linking to the party on zoom, and another link might say ‘listen to what the rest of us dancin queens are hearing’ linking to the watch2gether room.
Promo: Instagram
Considerations: I used the ‘create’ option on Instagram story to develop a poster and made sure to direct message it to friends in addition to posting it. The more I personally asked folks, the more they would attend.
Themes
Considerations: Space Cowboy, Halloween in May, Career Day (dress for the job you want, not the job you have), Queerantine Prom
Purchase an LED rotating discoball light, trust me. (Also recommended for use in score #8 of this series)
I personally had the most fun at the parties where I incorporated my going out routine beforehand. Getting dressed up (to theme of course), putting makeup on, pregaming with my roommates, maybe playing a drinking game or two.
Embodying a Florist: A Score for Listening to the News
Listen to the news on your headphones while picking flowers somewhere (maybe alleyways).
Return home, wash your hands.
Create a floral arrangement in a jar to view for the next week or so.
Backstory:
The Daily is a daily news podcast by The New York Times. Hosted by Times political journalist Michael Barbaro, its episodes are based on the Times' reporting of the day with interviews of journalists from the New York Times. Throughout the pandemic, The Daily has been featuring interviews with families who have been directly impacted by Covid-19 either through the illness or loss of a family member, or in some cases multiple family members. Some of these interviews also put forward the social disparities in coronavirus cases, highlighting the fact that people of color are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Listening to this podcast, and any news for that matter, is to put it plainly, difficult. If you aren’t someone who has a family member that’s contracted the virus yet, it forces you to put a name to the number, humanizing the issue at hand. Most people opt out of this difficult process, but is that helpful? I want to prioritize my mental health and also stay informed and aware.
To this task, I started going for walks while listening to The Daily through my headphones. Being outside feels good for me, especially in the mornings when there are less people to maintain 6 feet from. I took this a step further by beginning to pick flowers in alleyways while I walked. I do my best to suss out which flowers are wildflowers and which seem to have been planted by the owners of the house. Usually, I can tell by patterning—if the flowers are growing along a gate/fence/house or if there are multiple of the same plant in a row formation, it was probably planted there by a homeowner. I can also tell sometimes by the maintenance or lack there of. If the push is very large and growing in a way that doesn’t feel tidy, it’s probably fine to take some flowers. Anyways, I use my best judgement, and I never take more than two flowers from any given bush.
Now, I’m writing this as a white person, typically perceived as a woman, living in the Fan District of Richmond, Virginia. I know that my risk is fairly low when practicing this task, and it’s a large privilege to be able to walk anywhere, let alone alleyways, with very little worry for my safety. Here are some safety precautions I’ve developed. I only go alleyway picking during daylight, I try to keep one earphone in to maintain a sense of hearing / awareness of my surroundings. I don’t normally do this, but there’s the option to share my location via Find My Friends with someone I trust. I stay in an area that I’m familiar with.
It feels like I’m sort of memorializing the folks whose stories I’m listening to when I create the arrangements. Everytime I look at the flowers throughout the week, I think back to their stories, and the families that are mourning. The flowers also bring smiles to my roommates faces, which keeps me wanting to go back out for more.
Thank You
Thank you to Black Widow Books for the opportunity to be an artist in residence and for publishing this zine. Thank you to my encouraging peers who supported me throughout the writing of these scores. A special thank you to my ongoing writing partner and pal Hobbes; my long-term collaborator Natasha; my beautiful partner Natalie; and my beloved roommates Bridget, Cayla and Milo.
Lindsay Parnell (b. Pennsylvania 1995) is a performance, sculpture, and installation artist who currently lives and works in Richmond, VA. She graduated from the Sculpture + Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts in 2017 and was recently an artist in residence at the SOMA Summer Program in Mexico City, Mexico. In the summer of 2017, she attended Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL where she began a collaboration with Kevin Schwenkler. In winter of 2018 they attended the Saari Residency in Mynämäki, Finland together. Parnell has exhibited her work in spaces including Little Berlin in Philadelphia, PA; Present Co. in Brooklyn, NY; Urban Glass Center in Brooklyn, NY; Skylab in Columbus, OH; and various spaces in Richmond such as Gallery5, Black Iris, and Rump Gallery.
︎Lindsay’s IG
︎Lindsay’s Website