‘Thoughts in Passing’ portraits are road map to art of living
‘Thoughts in Passing’ portraits are road map to art of living
Last June, having completed five of these portraits, Biçen discovered You’re Going to Die — the monthly series, usually part open mike, part featured performance, that encourages people to explore their mortality together.
[...] Biçen told You’re Going to Die creator and host Ned Buskirk about “Thoughts in Passing,” and showed him the portraits.
[...] there wasn’t room to display the portraits, so Biçen created a simple video of each, zooming in slowly while the patients give a sort of concentrated reckoning of their own lives.
“I wanted viewers to be subsumed by the subjects’ portraits and stories, before their faces slowly faded into darkness,” Biçen said by email.
Earlier this month, one of Biçen’s portraits was selected as a winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian, where it will hang until next year.
All of the portraits can be seen and heard at www.thoughtsinpassing.com, and a full exhibition is to take place at Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes on Sunday, April 10.
At You’re Going to Die, each video was followed by a performance — a poet, writer or musician — and the evening crystallized when Andrew Blair of We Became Owls played a song about truck-driving in response to a man named Harlan, who spent his life driving trucks.
“It’s hard not to put your guts into a song when you are seeing such incredible art and hearing people reflect on their life as death approaches,” Blair said by email.
Founding editor of Tin House Magazine Rob Spillman reads from and talks with Glen David Gold about his memoir “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
William Taylor Jr. celebrates the publication of his collection of poems “To Break the Heart of the Sun.”
The Before Columbus Foundation, the Oakland Book Festival and the African-American Center of the San Francisco Public Library presents “Does the Secret Mind Whisper?,” a tribute to the life of poet Bob Kaufman, with performances by Anne Waldman, Will Alexander, David Boyce and Kevin Carnes.