the white night’s shadows
run like spilled ink down
the hills and drip its puddles
from pedestrians feet
the trees cypher light in broad strokes
of brushed sumi liquid over the earth
jumping puddle, river and streets
black mercury pools of shapes
and lines of gestalt fingerprints
a display on the absolute of gravity
and when the rain comes
the pools reflect the pedestrians shadows
back up like grounded butterflies
by Anja Marais
From Notebook: Kronstadt, Russia, May 2013
The sensory world is a cluster of
visuals, shapes, forms and gradients
it is an ocean I am drowning in
Sounds tumble from doors, windows
and the waves crescendo with laughter, music
a tsunami that rushed me off my feet
Ideas pile up like Tetris in multilevel
abstracts, hypothesizes, revelations
a Jenga that soon will collapse and crush me
by Anja Marais
Notebook May 3rd – Kronstadt, St Petersburg
Today I wrote a poem, sitting between the pigeons.
It went something like this…?
I wrote it on the back of my lost luggage customs form.
News finally came from Polcovo and I went to collect my orphaned suitcase.
Handing in my official form, now stamped with red bureaucracy circles,
forgetting about the poem penned on the back of it.
Sign here, sign here and sign here and yes you need to sign there.
Now my lonely words are afloat in the Russian ocean of
duplicate forms of black-pen-only frantic tourist scribbles.
The pigeons are still here but the words departed on a one way ticket.
from Notebook St.Petersburg Russia, May 2013
Being here I imagine Anna sitting on my bed and whispers to me in her native tongue while the sunlight seeps through the blinds:
2013 Anja Marais
8th November 1913
Sunlight fills my room
With hot dust, lucent, grey.
I wake, and I remember:
Today is your saint’s day.
That’s why even the snow
Is warm beyond the window,
That’s why, sleeplessly,
Like a communicant, I slept.
~Anna Akhmatova
SHIFT the stop animation that features a range of my sculptures, will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival!
It is currently on view at MOCA Miami’s exhibition “Pivot Points: 15 Years and Counting”. If you have not seen it yet please go by and see my sculptures coming alive!
•• video artist/filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar, artist/sculpture designer Anja Marais, photographer/ Juan Carlos Castañeda, music/composer Andy Brick ••
Explore my art at https://www.anjamarais.com/project/shift/
See a trailer and info of the film at http://www.shiftmovie.net/
© Juan Carlos Castaneda – Making of Shift 2012
