How to Be Elsewhere, A Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3HBO1EwXIR1mMSJlTLDwJG
Artist statement of Tomatoes, Resident Artist:
Tomatoes’ work exists at the intersection of social practice and the examination of the mundane. His primary media consist of cuddles-based happenings and elaborate rodent eviscerations. While at times controversial, he uses these disparate modalities to interrogate nuances of tenderness and violence in our domestic environments. He is also a local educator, working with under-served stray cat communities in the North Fork Valley.
How to Leave Elsewhere
1. Start and finish three last paintings the week before you leave. You created so much these past two months, but you can’t shake the urgency to make more. Time moves differently here. And the paintings are the only Paonia friends you can put in your trunk for the drive home.
2. Perform the closing number of the night for your last karaoke appearance in Paonia. Make sure you channel your feelings on stage by laying on the ground. Work the levels.
3. Ask for a tattoo from a friend in town who you met performing in the Rocky Horror shadow cast at the Paradise. You want her to poke the Elsewhere vortex into your arm.
4. She can’t meet up so you’ll have to come back. The Portal to Elsewhere is still open.
5. Take one last nap, because Tomatoes always joins you.
6. Walk down Grand and soak in that Truman Show feeling you get from the so so blue skies and everyone knowing your name.
7. You’re not alone on the 18 hour drive home, the aloe plants you adopted off the Paonia Message board are riding shotgun. They are planted with rocks from down by the river, near the labyrinth. You and the aloe plants can sing to each other all the way home. (See above playlist)
