June 1-June 30 at Assemble, 5125 Penn Ave. in Garfield.

Pittsburgh, PA … A team of Pittsburgh artists creates a new way of seeing our city in Ley Line, on show at Assemble gallery, 5125 Penn Ave. in Garfield, throughout the month of June. (The show opens with an event 6pm-10pm Fri., June 1, at Assemble, 5125 Penn Ave., Garfield, as part of Penn Avenue Unblurred.)

In Ley Line the artistic team closely examines a line of locations running through the city’s oft-misunderstood South Oakland neighborhood, creating artwork based equally in the area’s natural and built environment, and in its history, memory, and myth.

Conceived of by Justin Hopper, and curated by Hopper and Emily Walley, the team includes: painter Ashley Andrykovitch; artist, architect, and Assemble director Nina Marie Barbuto; music, dance, and video performers David Bernabo and Host Skull; writer Justin Hopper; collage artist Anne Roecklein; photographer Lisa Toboz; and installation artist Emily Walley. Throughout the months of March and April, the Ley Line team walked an imaginary line through South Oakland individually and together. The Assemble show combines the literal and abstract works inspired by these walks into a show that creates a new mythological view of the neighborhood.

Mapping the City with Myth

Ley Line takes a conceptual look at the concrete slabs and bricks of our city, the events they have witnessed, and the people who live within them. Drawing on ideas from such disparate influences as biodiversity science, travel literature, new age spiritualism, and local history, memory and myth, Ley Line is an artistic method of generating a new experience of Pittsburgh.

A stretch of Pittsburgh is denoted, walked, examined, and discussed by a small team of artists working in a variety of media. From this cartographic “core sample,” Ley Line creates a mythological imagining of our city’s soul .

While the works created may draw as much on the artists’ imaginations as on the reality they examine, their essence is of the city. Ley Line is a precedent for a way of walking, viewing, and experiencing the city with new senses – as a place of intangible but definite mythic beauty, where pedestrianism becomes a form of magick, and where past and present, art and science, conflate into the indefatigable urban ritual of living.

The Work

The work in Ley Line appears in a variety of media:

Ashley Andrykovitch’s paintings examine the connection between memory and place; Nina Marie Barbuto’s installations draw on the concept of botanical and entymological sampling; David Bernabo and Host Skull’s stop-motion videos include movement performances on location; Hopper’s embedded texts explore poetry associated with places and objects; Anne Roecklein’s collage looks at the myth of the “river”; Lisa Toboz’s photographs lie between architecture and portraiture; and Emily Walley’s installation disrupts the gallery’s space, much like the divide between Oakland’s permanent and transient residents.

All of the artwork in Ley Line is associated with specific locations along the imagined line. By walking through Assemble, visitors take an abstract walk along a map of new mythologies running through Oakland’s imagination.

A Brief History of Ley Lines

The concept of Ley Line is based on a prehistoric phenomenon well known to new-age and pop-archaeology practitioners alike.

In 1921, the British amateur antiquarian and pedestrian Alfred Watkins first identified the concept of the Ley Line in Britain. To Watkins, Leys were the remnants of the paths laid out by ancient Britons—alignments of significant man-made and natural structures that carved out a straight-line path between two or more locations. He believed that the alignment of hillocks and gravesites, churches and ancient footpaths, were the fingerprints remaining of once-sacred sites built and connected to create a network of ancient highways across the island. Over the centuries, he posited, the memory of these sacred sites’ use as track markers was lost, and they became the sites of first pagan, then Christian worship that mark their location today.

Throughout the 20^th-century, the concept alternately burned and fizzled in the minds of archaeologists and the popular culture. A key development came with John Michell’s 1969 book The View Over Atlantis—practically a sacred text of the hippie movement—which popularized the idea that Leys were, in fact, earth-energy lines marked out by ancient peoples for mystical use.

For Ley Line, artist-curator Justin Hopper appropriates both of these concepts of the psychic landscape. The ley line that the artists use as their denoted area of study begins at St. Paul Cathedral on Fifth Ave., and runs in a straight line through the former site of Forbes Field, past Andy Warhol’s childhood home, and to the beautiful shrine to the Virgin Mary located at Oakland’s cliffside edge, before the line falls down to the former Jones & Laughlin mill and spills into the Monongahela river.

About Assemble

Assemble is a 501(c)3 founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Nina Marie Barbuto in 2011. Our programming includes engaging interactive gallery shows, M3, Learning Parties, artist/maker/technologist talks, and workshops focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM). Assemble provides activities that foster learning and creativity for kids of all ages at our space in Garfield’s Penn Avenue arts district and at events throughout Pittsburgh.

Vision::

Assemble is a non-profit founded in 2010, which envisions a diverse community that creates, connects, and learns through the experience of art and technology.

Mission::

Assemble is an open physical space in an urban neighborhood in Pittsburgh. We unite artists, technologists, and makers with our neighbors of all demographics. Assemble provides a platform for experiential learning, opening creative processes and building confidence through making.

The episode which includes my piece, “Others Took Their Place,” is Episode 1, “The Louse,” and you can listen to it here.

Constable painted these parts, but it’s certainly not Constable Country; Turner would’ve loved the twilight light – a baroque sheen that the master did, indeed, discover in Kent, the county I see from my window. But the great British artist who would most like the Southend we see before us is Ballard: a borough ruled by the auto and the airplane; a liminal landscape dominated by oil and gas storage tanks astride painterly maritime coastlines, where the hairdressers and fry cooks seem, to the naked eye, unchallenged in their economic dominance.

In fact, if certain elements of the current government get their way, this area could become a Ballardian theme park with the addition of a new floating airport in the middle of the mouth of the Thames. The Thames Estuary Airport – despised, as far as I can tell, by swathes of Southend, and with good reason – would mean two international airports within a few miles of one another, along with London’s other runways, all skittering between Anglo-Saxon churches and acres of petrol storage. All the world’s a suburb, the men and women merely players.

I’ve now spent over a week in Southend, living at artspace Metal’s residencies in Chalkwell Hall, peering out over the water. (“It’s hard to keep in mind that it’s not the ocean; that it’s just a river,” I said the other night sitting at its edge near a pub. Local raconteur-turned-author Syd Moore looked at me like an idiot: “Yeah? See – there’s the other side.”) I’m working on the aforementioned Public Record: Southend project – an idea that’s morphing constantly and yet not quite enough; one that needs to be reassessed in light of a fragment of understanding about this town, its history and identity, its Oaze. I’ve gotten a bit stuck in the mudflats; tricked by the starlight so prevalent here, just 40 miles along the Thames from London’s flooding light pollution; confused by the local accent, in which “Restaurant” is pronounced “Fish ‘n’ Chips.”

I’d meant to blog-the-hell outta this time in Essex, and yet here I am, halfway through, and loading up WordPress for the first time since Pittsburgh. When last I blogged, Maurice Sendak, Duck Dunn, and MCA were all still alive. Excuse the absence, and also the chrono-confusion to come, as I catch up with a few bits ‘n’ pieces that I’ll let land as they fall.

Yet I think there’s a certain beauty in the opportunity to make a Public Record-style site-specific poetry project for Southend-on-Sea - a project I’m excited to begin next week in residency at Metal, a truly marvelous arts space and artwork generator in that seaside town. The point of Public Record is to look at a place at a time of upheaval and historical tumult – a time when that town, neighborhood, or culture is being wracked with change in population, economy, mindset. Public Record looks not at how the landscape physically changed at these moments, but what spiritual archaeology can tell us about the ordinary people who lived there – and what their psychogeographic ghosts say in their hauntings.

Victorian and Edwardian Southend was ground zero for the latest invention of the industrial revolution: the “holiday,” as they say in England. We call it vacation. In Southend it’s more than either – it’s an economy and a geography; a cultural architecture and a beast of burden. While Pittsburgh was changing forever with sweat and steel, Southend was altering just as much, but with parasol and pier.

For most of May, I’ll be staying in Southend, researching a history of calamity, and using that work to create audio poems that we’ll digitally site around Metal’s Chalkwell Park environs. I’m going to make a proper effort to track the process here on ye olde Edwardian website, so maybe pop by every now and again, eh? And, of course, when it’s all wrapped up, the work will be available to the public for free – pints on me for any and all Yinzers who stop by.

Created by The Mustard Club – a project of actress & producer Rebecca Tremain and editor & co-producer Rob Falconer – the series is produced in conjunction with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Each episode takes both a scientific and a poetic/artistic look at one of the creepy-crawlies that comprise the “gilded” vectors of the School’s study – lice, fleas, snakes, rats, ticks, mosquitos, bedbugs, and flies.

In an inspired act of counterintuitive radio, Tremain and Falconer have brought in writers and musicians alongside the School’s world-renowned scientists to discuss these mighty mites in terms that veer from freakish and frightening to downright hilarious.

Up first on April 4 (7:30pm GMT; 2:30pm EST) is the dreaded Louse – scourge of the trenches and schoolyards alike. This episode includes my prose-poem, “Others Took Their Place,” using text sampled from World War I-era scientific studies and troops’ memoirs as well as new writing.

It’s all on Resonance FM in London, and listenable worldwide online.

Unfortunately, it closes this weekend, even as one of its star attractions – the Center for PostNatural History created by Rich Pell – opens in a permanent space on Penn Ave. in Garfield this Friday night. So be sure to get to CMU campus and the Miller Gallery over the next few days to see Intimate Science.

London is – shall we say – a Centre Point for new artistic media and methods looking at a city’s physical, historic, and psychic landscape. In this blog, I’ll be keeping a running tab on the curation of this project, including material about artists and writers either in the show or working in similar ways, the Pittsburgh-specific complementary projects, and all sorts of other aspects of this process.

I hope it’s enjoyable and perhaps even useful.