The Spring 2014 Quarterly Newsletter is in!

Visit www.carolaperla.com for contact details on how to receive the newsletter via email:

 

Gibbin House - CTC Virtual Book Tour - February 8 -15, 2014

 

 

Just recently I ran a Google search for "Gibbin House" and stumbled upon the most remarkable thing - the last line of my novel being quoted as a keynote at a National Youth Assembly for the United Reformed Church in the UK (the theme was Lost and Found: People in Exile)...

http://stewartcutler.com/

 

I assume the speaker probably Googled the line (in much the same indiscriminate manner as I had my name), being in search of a quote about exile, and stumbled on it on Goodreads (I assume this because my circle of readers remains, for a lack of a better word, concise).  The path, however, is really quite irrelevant, as what matters is what it signifies - that even in relative obscurity, in this day and age, a self-published work has a life, a resonance of its own in the ether...the Internet is a wonder...



That said, I happily and most enthusiastically announce the upcoming Virtual Tour of "Gibbin House", conducted by Closed The Cover, February 8 -15, 2014.  Below is the schedule, which includes an assortment of book reviews, excerpts, Q & A, guest posts, and fantastic giveaway!  Stay tuned!

Tour Schedule

February 8, 2014
Closed the Cover - Kick-Off Post and Giveaway
Library Educated - Book Review

February 9, 2014
Life of a Female Bibliophile - Book Review

February 10, 2014
Hobby Lady - Book Excerpt

February 11, 2014
All R Media - Book Review

February 12, 2014
A Book Geek - Book Excerpt

February 13, 2014
Not Drinking Coffee - Book Excerpt

February 14, 2014
Book Hostage - Author Q&A

February 15, 2014
Traveling with T - Book Review and Guest Post

 

Peripheral ARTeries Art Review - Article and Interview, Dec 2013 issue - Carola Perla

This past December Peripheral ARTeries Art Review featured an 8-page spread on my art work, along with one of the most thorough interviews I've done in a long time.  It was such a wonderful opportunity to share my experiences, inspiration, and thoughts on the direction of contemporary art. 

Check it out!

http://issuu.com/artpress/docs/peripheral_arteries_art_review_-_de

 

 

Four Points Contemporary: Latest Exhibition Selection

This past August, I had the honor of being selected to the Four Points Contemporary's 1st Annual All Media International Juried exhibition.  The online exhibition, which seeks to discover promising talent from among emerging international artists, runs now through September 30th, 2013.  Visit the link to see the complete exhibit: Four Points Contemporary Current Exhibitions .

The honor tops off an amazing summer of 'Little Victories', from Bronze in the Art Ascent Magazine "Emergence' Competition to 'Best in Show' at the Foundry Art Centre's 'Papercuts' exhibit, as well as selection in the Vargas Gallery's '2013 South Florida Group' Show and the American Art Jury's 'Gallery of Invited Artists' Salon, as well as a feature article in South Florida's Sun Post.  On the literature front, 'Gibbin House' has also had its little moment in the sun, with reviews, interviews and author spotlights, and giveaways.

In all, it's only been six months since I began an active push towards making my art more public, and the response goes to show what can come from some concentrated efforts.  As I begin 'Humboldt's' Riches' and the 'KONZEPTION' series, I foresee this forward trajectory slowing, being that writing and making art will once again consume my free time.  Let's see what the next six months bring...

 

Carola Perla Author Interview @ MoonShine Art Spot

This month I had the pleasure to speak with MoonShine Art Spot in a special author interview, released in conjunction with the Summer Giveaway Hop 2013.   I had the chance to address my inspiration for "Gibbin House" and other personal experiences that made it into the book.  Here is an excerpt from the interview.  To read in its entirety, follow the link:

 

MoonShine Art Spot Interview with Carola Perla

 

In your debut novel “Gibbin House”, the protagonist is a young Romanian woman who is forced to leave her home after the Second World War and start a new life in London.   Is this story of exile based on anything that happened to you?

To some extent, yes, although I was much younger than Anka when I left Communist-era Romania in 1979.  Five years earlier, my father had traveled from his native Peru to Timisoara, to study biology at the Polytechnic University.  He hadn’t been there long when he went to a party and met a leggy blonde with John Lennon glasses.  He barely spoke a word of Romanian, but he was beautiful and brilliant in after-shave and bell bottom jeans.  It was a typical hippie love story, but for the fact that the Ceausescu regime forbade relationships with foreigners... to continue...

 

Did you have your mother in mind when you wrote about Anka’s journey to London?

Naturally.  Here is this young woman – my mother - with an old suitcase and a baby in her arms, without a penny to her name, having never eaten spaghetti or watched a scary movie, in clothes she’s sewn herself, getting on a plane, and seeing her own mother, as far as she knows, for the last time in her life...to continue...

 

 

Do you see migration as a central theme to “Gibbin House”?

 

Certainly one of them.  I’m interested in how people find a ‘home’, what that means.  It would have been a very important consideration after the war, with so many homes destroyed, families separated, political boundaries redrawn, deportations forced on various ethnic groups.  How do people recapture ‘home’ after all that?...to continue...

 

Did any other personal experiences find their way into the book?

Like most authors, I write what I know, mostly in terms of relationships between people. Anka’s feelings in a new country are very familiar to me; her inability to speak mirrors my many months spent in silence every time I moved to a country where I did not know the language.  Her close connection with her mother is also something where I could inject elements of myself.   And of course there’s the romantic plotline...to continue...

 

 

To read the interview in its entirely, go to www.MoonShineArtSpot.blogspot.com



KONZEPTION: My New Literature/Art Project Unveiled!

Be the first to read up on my new series KONZEPTION, an unprecedented literature/art installation project, recently unveiled on August 10th, 2013 and scheduled to last through Summer 2014 with the completion of "Humboldt's Riches":

 

 

KONZEPTION – a cross-pollinating literary fiction and art installation project – aims to make a novel visually manifest by interpreting its creative process concurrent with its evolution, from inception to publication, through works of cut-paper sculpture and mixed media visual poetry installations.  The art works become inextricably linked to the written word with the novel’s opening lines, which are composed within the first piece in the series “Konzeption: Prologue”.  Subsequently, as the writing process continues, the novel’s themes and events inform new installations, while they in turn serve as springboards and incubators for later chapters. 

 KONZEPTION marries Carola Perla’s prose work with her sculptural ‘Lichtsprache’ – lighted cut-paper sculpture and visual poetry installations.  She created her first installation, “Off the Page” (2011), as a direct reaction to the hermetic process of writing her debut novel “Gibbin House”.  Her desire to visually celebrate the completion of this book led to further exploration in ‘lighted’ words and cut paper that incorporated published text as well as in situ ‘poetry chants’.  KONZEPTION  picks up where “Off the Page” left off, examining the birth of the novel instead.  The source here is the in-progress literary fiction novel “Humboldt’s Riches”, a semi-autobiographical Heart of Darkness that follows a young family’s escape from the remote Amazon region of Apurimac during Peru’s 1980 guerilla uprisings.

 

“Konzeption: Prologue”, written in a similar way to other ‘poetry chants’, sets the stage for this South American adventure story.  Breathlessly, it describes the dangerous task of driving in the Andes.  As a spontaneous composition, the prologue cannot be amended.  With no space for error, the artist is much like the Andean driver, maneuvering on a knife’s edge, aware that each carved word will irrevocably form part of the novel’s opening scene. Above the lines hangs the second sculptural element of the piece, a theatrical curtain that introduces this story.   Ruffled and fragile, with lace-like lattice cuts, the constructed white ‘curtain’ is meant to work simultaneously fragile as well as imposing and precarious in its weight and irregularity. Like an avalanche, with its frayed layers casting craggy shadows, the curtain portends the nebulous beginnings of something.

“Konzeption: Prologue” was unveiled on August 10, 2013, officially launching the KONZEPTION series that is projected for completion in summer 2014.  A special-edition photo book documenting the KONZEPTION project will be released as a companion to "Humboldt's Riches" upon publication. 

 

 

 

JOURNEYS: "Paper Cuts" Exhibit at the Foundry Art Centre, June 28, 2013

 

Ever since sending off my two large installations, "Spelling Bee" and "Se Vende",  to St. Charles last week for the "PaperCuts" exhibit, I have been experiencing terrible pangs of anxiety. 

I keep wondering if it's because I'm worried about the state they will arrive in (being they've never traveled that far)?  Have I provided the right materials to display them?  Will they be hung correctly? Will they will make it back to me safe and sound in October?

And then I again, I wonder if my mind is really on something much more deep-seated...am I worried about how they will be received?  What would I do if someone wanted to buy them, would I be happy about it, or spin into another spiral of worry altogether?

And what if it's not any of the above?  What if it's because I am entering a new phase of my artistic life, which is my life essentially?  Starting this July, I will be participating in two separate gallery exhibits, in addition to unveiling a second piece for my upcoming novel "Humboldt's Riches" at ATELIER 1022.  I have left the safety of my own studio and have ventured out into the world.  I have no idea what reaction to expect.  There is as much responsibility in success as there is in failure...will I look back on this summer and see it as the monumental shift in direction as if feels to me now?  Is this the start of something or just a wave, a swell as occurs from time to time only to see things die down again?

 

I deliberate on all this from my seat at the dining table/computer desk in my living room.  Slanted rays of afternoon sun play on the palm fronds outside my window, balmy air pulsates through the mosquito mesh.  I am stationary, yet in motion...I am, I realize like my Anka in "Gibbin House", traveling without moving...Again, as so often in the past ten years, I find myself in her shoes, and it is brought home to me how very real my heroine is, and I love her all the more for it.  She understands what I feel just now.  As I enter this next chapter, I offer these lines:

"I pulled the covers over me, but my skin prickled from the inescapable chill that comes from lying alone.  I could not gather myself tight enough to feel solid and whole.  My stomach still seared from the coffee and now the astringent gin.  All the fluid in my insides rocked with the forward motion of the past week.  I lay inert, and yet my body was on a train, on a ferry, in a subterranean car, traveling without moving.

 

"I now feel most intimately that the process of traversing distance is an erosion of the spirit.  The thrill of change that accompanies the onset of a journey is a deception, the fearful attachment to outcome which makes adrenaline kick in a way not entirely un-pleasurable propelling the lie.  For a moment one feels positively alive.  One is duped into committing to the chaos.  One inhales the fumes, joins in rigid attack stances near sliding compartment doors.  One holds on feverishly as stuttering wheels grind to a halt.  One is titillatingly taunted by visions of missed connections, rerouted trains.  One presses on.

But after hours of vigilance and wide-eyed awake-ness, one adopts patience.  Or as it ought to be known, the self-congratulatory brother of fatigue.  Patience then gives way to indifference, and in time one becomes a heretic to the creed of goals and ends and satin-ribboned resolutions.  One stops caring about the names of foreign cities, stops seeking out their hearts from window seats.  Eventually one realizes they are all disfigured, all the same sketch of blasted glass and ruins and fire-retardant weeds, anonymous to the fickle gazes that graze them.  One drifts among them, a shipwrecked figure on Gericault’s raft, gaunt and delirious, running one’s arm through the air outside without hope or aim." (p. 36-38)

 

 

 

 

Homage to Casa Marsano: "Se Vende" Visual Poetry Installation by Carola Perla Unveiled

This May 11th, I unveiled my latest visual poetry installation "Se Vende" during ATELIER 1022's 2-Year Anniversary event.

 It was a special evening for me, as it also marked 2 years since the launch of Gibbin House.

How strange, I kept thinking to myself as I stood posing for photos, that a work I had once lived with behind closed doors for nearly nine years was no longer a private thing, indeed for two years already it had aged, shaken out its skirts and petticoats in the public eye, gotten all adult on me like a teenager graduating college.  It gives you that feeling of "when did I get so old?".  And yet, I also felt relieved.  Relieved, realizing that two years into the completion of Gibbin House, the reason for its existence, the need to exorcise and 'verarbeiten' (as the Germans say) which drove me to write it in the first place, remained the same force behind my work today.

I realized that, although I had never admitted it to myself as I tinkered away at my novel, I was afraid of finishing the book and having nothing left to say.  Perhaps it's why I worked on it for so many years...but looking at the emotional investment in "Se Vende", I knew that wasn't the case.  One way or another I have found projects to express my world views. I have looked for ways to lay things bare, expose ironies and elevate beauties, as an artist ought.  "Se Vende" is probably most emblematic of this impetus - it addresses the sudden and controversial tearing down of Casa Marsano, a known Lima landmark from 1941-2002 and a house that holds a special place in the history of my family.  The building, which was far from dilapidated, could not be saved because it was deemed by authorities to hold no cultural or architectural value (when I see photos of Ocean Drive from the 40's and the row of Art Deco palaces that used to stud that street, I am reminded that Casa Marsano is not the only house to have been so disregarded.)  Judging by the websites, articles, and blogs dedicated posthumously to Casa Marsano, it's clear that the landmark was not only significant to my relatives, but to a city at large.  It's destruction begs the question of what we value in ourselves when we destroy the monuments to beauty that promised such permanence, such continuation.  The poem in "Se Vende" does this by repeating 'for sale' and using cultural references to ask how far we go in selling our patrimony.  The accompanying voice recording of me reading the poem add to the echo effect.

I'm proud of this piece, this examination of a house, my second 'house' as it were:) From Gibbin House to Casa Marsano, I will continue to strive for authenticity and illuminating expression.  Here is to another two years...

And thank you to the Miami SunPost for the great write-up in anticipation of the unveiling.  Follow the link here to read the article in full: http://miamisunpost.com/art-visual-poet-carola-perla/

Argentina's El Clarin Recommends ATELIER 1022 and Carola Perla!

Argentina's largest newspaper EL CLARIN, which is also the most wide-read Spanish-language newspaper online, recently published a travel article on Wynwood that recommends ATELIER 1022 as one of the neighborhoods best galleries!  Echoing our 'Artvergnugen' mantra, the article lists me and my fellow artists by name.  Thank you for the great incusion!

To read the article in full, follow the link here:
 

http://www.clarin.com/viajes/arte-moda-Miami_0_896910308.html

Closed The Cover Guest Post by Carola Perla (me!:)

Had the pleasure this week of submitting a guest post to the Closed The Cover book review website.  In it I address my motivation as an author and some ruminations on what inspired me and my work from an early age.  If you're curious to read more about what gave rise to Gibbin House and its heroine Anka, check out the rest of the post here!

http://www.closedthecover.com/16/category/carola%20perla/1.html