Red Room :
Journey into the Color Red

Installation and Interactive Performance 2010

Red Room

2011

I wore Red for a year. The year I moved back to Brooklyn from California.

In the Red Room All was Red. Red clothes. Skin was Red. The walls were covered in the clothing and blankets acquired in a year of Red. All was Red except for white leaf shapes on our cheeks and forehead like 4 extra white eyes.

Upon entering the Red Room, visitors continually looked down at their arms and clothing, but it remained the same, as the light was full spectrum. The magic of color is never ending, but palpably feeling the difference, and the mind flipping its cognition between solid color and light color comprehension, vacillating on the fulcrum of the color Red, was a trip. A palpable feeling that stirred quandary, but was moreover a life changing experience that for many instigated deep emotions, sobbing and passions.

Visitors interacted with me and my two Red assistants to my left and right. Silence, facial expressions and a language of musical sounds is how we spoke with each other and guests to the Red Room. Red seemed to naturally shed language. That part was unplanned, but also helped people get out of their dull, analytical, critical minds and open themselves up to being moved by an experience. My art is not about magic it is magic.

Upon entering the Red Room, guests would see three Red women, staring back at them. Guests checked back at their own bodies constantly, to see that they remained exactly the same. Not red in any way. Without the use of words, each guest was invited to put their hands in my Red hands. Red everywhere all around. The power of Red spoke to the sacred self within the self. Behind the language of chit chat, of measuring, of liking and not liking, Red seemed to naturally limit the power of language. Another self emerged. Visitors laughed, cried and expressed themselves in all sorts of surprising ways. During a lull in visitors, one woman found herself alone with us there and asked, “Do you mind?” as she whipped her shirt off and shook out her hair. She felt so free and wild there. Each person was so different from the next. Many wept. Most Wept.

After time with me, the guest would move along to my Red helpers who painted white leaf shapes on their cheeks and forehead, like we red beings had on ours, marking that they had been to our realm. They carried the face paint as a token of their journey to be recognized, or puzzled by others, when they left the Red Room into the crowd or down into the streets of NYC.

The Red Room was an intense environment intensified by human presence and activated through interaction. Dropping into a Red place where the mind’s reaction to the color combined with the intimacy of human contact felt like visiting with others inside our own bodies. It was a vehicle to the very physicality of an element in all its potency and power.

RED ROOM by Sunny Atema
'A Light in the Basement', group show of installations
Stanhope Cellar Studios
Brooklyn NY. April 1, 2011