NOW is a 10 screen, large scale, audience participatory, performance video installation, including a projection on water with a running time of 24 minutes looped. Written and performed by Monet Clark it was shot and produced in collaboration with media art pioneer John Sanborn.
You can watch a single channel curator’s version of the piece here:
From SF/Arts: NOW is propelled by two hilarious (s)heros: the sarcastic, rage filled, haute goth Catharsis and the vamp, valkyrie, yogini Perspicacious, both played by Clark. Exploring the nexus between technology and ritual the characters and their audience cast a mystical space in an urban gallery, ‘creating a ritualistic experience for the current political climate.’
NOW’s unique allure lies within its two largely projected character’s humorous and direct address of each other and their audience, and their invitation for the audience to participate in a ritual process. NOW’s protagonists wittily survey contemporary and historical pitfalls. They ultimately bring their audience into the present now moment, where surrounded by a sacred circle of 6 monitors, they’re guided through spiritual and physiological exercises using breath, intention and wishes for altered states of perception.
A segment of the piece involves Clark’s character Perspicacious preparation of a vibrational Flower Essence remedy on camera, and individual bottles of the remedy are given to audience members in person at the gallery. This allows opportunity for the ritual process of the work to continue after people leave its presence. The healing properties of the formula’s carefully selected ingredients are listed below.
The script written by Clark, plays off of the interactions and differing vantage points of the collaborators during their process of making NOW. It crosses her feminist performance/video practice with her lifelong study of natural healing disciplines and mysticism, with an intention to confront the latter subject’s taboo status within intellectual circles. Clark is interested in an intersectional feminist discourse that explores these taboos as symptoms of misogyny and racism and as symptomatic of the suppression of non-essentialist feminine principals, potentially existent in all genders. NOW examines these cultural biases and taboos and ties them to global warming. It ponders the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural evolution. It explores indigenous, holistic, environmental, pre-burning times and pre-patriarchal perspectives, and animism, cross cultural spiritual philosophies, and even the medium of punk rock as a tool for spiritual transmutation.
NOW reveals an emerging scientifically based melting pot mysticism, and an individual-micro/global-macro connection where “you matter now.”
The below images capture the debut of NOW at SF Camerawork February 8th – April 7th, 2018
NOW’s flower essence:
Witch Hazel: Heals fears of witches or witchcraft and an ambivalent relationships to one’s own healing gifts. Heals discomfort being public about one’s intuitive, psychic and clairvoyant gifts, or other gifts for non-western modalities of healing, or magic. Inspires courage for new beginning.
Heliopsis: Produces a positive vortex alignment, and brings light into areas that have had a dim exposure to positivity and divine light. Works on all chakras, especially the 3rd chakra the center for one’s will. Boots one’s ability to create.
Russian Sage: Opens the respiratory system. Encourages breath. Sets heart’s aflame with love, affections, gratitude, joy and abundance, diverting adversity. Encourages spiritual maturity by helping us transition out of a state of confusion, desolation and barrenness.
Monkshood/Wolfsbane: Heals the repression of one’s psychic and spiritual abilities due to trauma and abuse. Heals fear of psychic openings. Encourages a profound capacity for clairvoyance and courageous spiritual leadership, well integrated with social and moral values.
NOW, A Video Art Ritual was made possible by the generous support of the following sponsors: 
(First 3 installations shots and poster images by Roger Jonse)