90: Salty: Activist Artists and Cultural Organizers Changing the World Through Art - Part 1

EpisodePull back the curtain on one of Salty's works and there's no telling what you will find -- a film, a party, an intimate discussion, a festival, a newspaper, a concert, a feast, and more often than, not an invitation to decide whether you want to participate as an audience member. or as part of the show.BIOSalty Xi Jie Ng co-creates semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the intimate vernacular. Often playing with relational possibilities, her interdisciplinary work is manifested from fantasy scores for the present and future that propose a collective re-imagining through humor, care, subversion, play, discomfort, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. Her practice dances across forms such as brief encounter, collaborative space, variety show, poem, conversation, meal, publication, film, performance. As a citizen scholar of the cosmos, Xi Jie explores aging, intimacy, food, lineage, identity, ritual and power, while questioning who artists are and what gets to be called art. Her research of everyday as performance bears fruit as tender presentations somewhere between art and life. Centering the body and its histories, she constructs portrayals of self and space that are ambiguous, raw, dream-like, absurd, mundane. At heart she is a cosmic clown, floating at the intersections of wonder and melancholy, existential meditation and devotional nonsense.Notable MentionsColumbia River Correctional Institution, Creative Initiatives: Columbia River Creative Initiatives is a series of artist run programs and classes held at the Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon.Fred Armisen: is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and musician. He is best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 2002 until 2013.[3] With his comedy partner Carrie Brownstein, Armisen was the co-creator and co-star of the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia.The Inside Show: is a variety show produced at Columbia River Creative Initiatives, an artist-led creative platform in Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Portland, Oregon. The show is produced in prison, where inmates take on roles of host, performer, writer, and cameraperson. This robust collaboration of eccentric possibilities challenges perceptions of incarcerated individuals and what happens ‘on the inside’. The show’s content includes Microwave Magic— a cooking segment where inmates showcase genius ways of making gourmet meals with minimal ingredients and a microwave; comedy sketches; a goofy sports roundtable; art segments; poignant discussions; braiding demos; musical acts and more.Salty Xi Jie Ng: The Cosmos Wait for You: Salty’s web site. ArtsWok Collaborative (Singapore): We are an arts-based community development organisation that recognizes the creativity and agency within individuals and communities to generate change.We believe in collaborating to imagine and develop thriving communities in a sustainable society. Since 2012, we have done this through the creative producing of innovative projects that demonstrate the power of the arts for change, the capability development of growing practitioners in our field, and researching and advocating for arts-based community development.Being Ourselves Together (Salty’s essay): “In sharing and holding space with other living, breathing beings to make art, I work to create alchemical conditions for people to be themselves in a violent, dehumanizing, often cruel world. In some sense, that is all I can purport to offer in participatory or collaborative processes. By providing a space with sparks and prompts that challenge, magnify, see, or subvert the everyday and the issues we face, some kind of transmutation happens—in the same way that encountering any artwork changes us in small or profound ways, simply because we meet a new idea. In every collaborative project, energetic bodies with histories and personalities dance with each other, constellating their individual selves and the collective in mysterious ways.” Salty Xi Jie NgChange the Story / Change the World: A chronicle of art and community transformation.Singapore Minstrel. Roy Payamal: Roy Payamal is the wildest busker of a country ranked the world’s most emotionless society. He takes his undermined line of work as a serious art- but is his faith impossible idealism or an admirable conviction? Singapore Minstrel is an invitation into his beautiful mind, a magical, trying universe where art and life dialogue in a tropical dream. An old-time pioneer of the local scene, sometimes dubbed the ‘Silver Man’, Roy creates spectacular installations for his mind-boggling acts. His street colleagues are a troupe of offbeat, seasoned buskers– from a 70-year-old man who dances Gangnam Style with vitality, to a lovable guitarist trying to pass the busking auditions. The film flows kaleidoscopically from interviews to fantasy sequences, to raw footage of everyday life Roy captures on his mobile phone. Street Found In 2021, artist Salty Xi Jie Ng edited and published STREET FOUND, a book of Roy Payamal’s writing and images. An event of the same name was organized on the final night of operations of the original Substation.Post Love: A fantasy-documentary on love and sex from the perspectives of elderly Singaporeans who were brought up in the conservative tradition of yesteryear.Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA Program: PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA defines what it means to be an artist in society. In our three-year, flexible-residency program, you’ll combine individual research, group work, and experiential learning to find new ways to engage with your art and the community. Our program’s blend of critical and professional practice, progressive pedagogy, collaborative social engagement, and transdisciplinary exploration produces an immersive educational experience.Options for Community Arts Training & Support: In recent years, an increasing number of artists and arts organizations have been joining in partnerships with other community sectors to advance the healthy development of their communities. The result is a proliferation of cross-sector collaborations and opportunities. In the fall of 2015, Intermedia Arts joined with Animating Democracy at Americans for the Arts to sponsor a study the Center for the Study of Art & Community designed to learn more about where community arts training is currently taking place and where there may be future interest. "I am a beautiful beached whale by the Straights ," (film) The unique, gently sparkling universe of elderly women is traversed in this film with a surreal, intimate lens, through the everyday lives and intimate thoughts of the filmmaker’s grandmothers. These converse with meditative images of an elderly lady at a beach, twinkling on the shore of another cosmos.Hollywood Senior Center: Community for Positive Aging was founded as Hollywood Senior Center in 1973, a nonprofit committed to creating an uplifting and vibrant environment for adults 55 and older while providing a channel for intergenerational relationships and learning. For more than 45 years, CFPA has focused on offering a diverse range of services with the singular focus of empowering older...