Articles & Interviews

Complete text below

2021 — Confronting Racial (In)Justice: Charlie Levin’s Immersive Performance Art Approach, Elizabeth Churchill, ACM Interactions XXVIII.5 September–October, 2021
2018 — UpFront with Cat Brooks, Cat Brooks, May 1, 2018
2018 — Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, Wanda Sabir, January 9, 2018
2016 — Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, Wanda Sabir, April 29, 2016
2016 — Living Single: Charlie Levin at SFIAF, Elizabeth Costello, SF Weekly, May 11, 2016
2014 — Waxing Poetic: Charlie Levin’s Paintings as Performance, Irene Hsiao, SF Weekly, Dec. 15, 2014
2016 — Living Single by Elizabeth Costello, SF Weekly, May 11, 2016
2014 — Waxing Poetic: Charlie Levin's Paintings as Performance by Irene Hsiao, SF Weekly, December 15, 2014

.............................

Reviews of other work by Charlie Levin

CONFRONTING RACIAL (IN)JUSTICE: CHARLIE LEVIN’S IMMERSIVE PERFORMANCE ART APPROACH

by Elizabeth Churchill,
ACM Interactions XXVIII.5 September–October, 2021

Racism is often talked about in terms of the actions of single individuals. However, racism is a collective, social phenomenon. A number of areas of research and practice take this as a starting point for intervention and change. One example, "social dreaming," takes a collective psychotherapeutic approach [1], working to uncover underlying anxieties through individual dreams as resonances of (sometimes unspoken) collective social value systems. Similarly, within the trauma treatment community, approaches to addressing collective trauma from systematic, sustained racial discrimination treat racism collectively rather than individually. It is from this starting point of the social and collective that I invited Charlie Levin, an accomplished UX designer, to talk about her provocative performance art piece The One Truthiness [2,3]. In this piece, she addresses racial bias and (in) justice as a community conversation.

Context

Inspired by Oakland's 2014 Black Lives Matter protests and continuing today, The One Truthiness "provides a space where conflicting truths coexist," addressing racial (in)justice through collective, immersive narrative and visual storytelling. More concretely, The One Truthiness is a participatory performance featuring a colored melted wax painting created in real time as quotes from the lived experiences of Black and white people are read by audience members from a book that is passed from one person to the next. As the text is read, Levin paints from behind a large clear panel. The series of painted scenes emerge as the text is read aloud. The audience sees these scenes, but Levin is creating something quite different on the other side of the glass. Her perspective is revealed at the end of the performance, when she turns the frame around. The final part of the event is a moderated discussion in which audience members discuss what they have experienced.

An Interview with Charlie Levin

Elizabeth Churchill: Can you describe the project?

Charlie Levin: I start with a clear glass panel as a metaphor for how we think we start with a blank slate. The wax is translucent and backlit. When backlit, the image is like stained glass. When lit from the front, the object looks like a traditional solid physical object. I was able to structure the painting such that the front light and back light reveal two completely different images.

Audience members read from a prepared text that is passed from one person to another. Each person reads one short passage, comment, or statement. People read from whatever page the book is at when it comes to them. Which means one person may voice something they haven't experienced or would never say or want to say. In reading, you inhabit someone else's shoes/experience. The text is designed to strip away the identity of the speaker, leading to self-awareness of our assumptions about who said it. An example could be "I no longer feel safe running in my neighborhood." Reading this out loud puts one in their shoes, makes one think, What circumstances would make me feel that? That particular statement was offered by a middle-aged Black man who has lived in his house for 20 years. He fears that his new white neighbors don't know him and might "call the cops."

As stories fill the mind and images fill the panel, a world is created together.

As the audience reads, I paint. The audience sees what is being painted and can follow the connection between the text that is passed around and the image, story by story, image upon image. Each image serves as a counterpoint to what came before. As stories fill the mind and images fill the panel, a world is created together. It is a portrait of a community. You think you know what you have seen and what you have heard. Yet, at the end, the panel is rotated to reveal an image that was seen only by me, the painter.

Altogether, it immerses the audience in a visceral experience that we never know everything. There is always a different perspective that is literally different—not just a different interpretation of commonly agreed-upon facts.

After the performance, the audience gathers to discuss what they experienced, moderated by my collaborator, Dr. Ayodele Nzinga. A multiracial community gets into a dynamic debate over what was literally in front of their eyes. Questions are posed: Was the reclining figure dead? Homeless? Or merely sleeping? Our assumptions and reference points become visible and shared in the group conversation.

EC: What inspired you to create this project?

CL: My artwork already centered around complexity and perspective—how differently things are experienced depending on one's frame of reference and perspective. How nothing is ever just what it first appears.

In 2014 I visited the binational community Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam—where Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs are living together consciously in conflict with all their differences being grappled with in-community. I returned to the U.S. just as the protests were rising after the courts decided not to prosecute police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. My Israel experience had shifted my perspective and heightened my awareness of in-community conflicting perspectives; I was hearing a dramatic range of responses from all sides in my own community of Oakland and on social media—people I knew. Activists were designing protests to block the highways. And then there were people who couldn't get home after work who didn't understand the point of it. There were people taking part in marches, but were very critical of property violence during the march. I heard statements like, "My heart breaks to live in a country that won't prosecute Darren Wilson, but breaking windows is not a valid form of protest. I hope they lock them all away." There were people asking, "Why are they protesting in Oakland? It didn't happen in Oakland."

It was so clear to me that in my own society, as a white person, it is hard to see what has "always been the way things are." What is "normal"? It was so much easier to chalk up stories of terrible things happening to Black people as outliers. There are a million ways to diminish and write people off. The more I realized that Black and white Americans were experiencing radically different realities across the board, the question "What is normal?" became an entry point. How did it become normal? Why is it normal? For whom is what normal?

I created The One Truthiness to create a virtual and focused experience of the coexistence of radically different perspectives living in parallel. I would like to do the project with an existing community with a past and a future together—how would this experience of visibility into the "in-group" conversation change the vision and practice for the larger community? Would it change their perception and acceptance of one another? Would it create more empathy for each other's logic and context and challenges? Can we come together to address what our varying realities look like?

EC: The reading was such a powerful part of the piece. Can you tell us more about the texts?

CL: I wanted to represent a more complex picture of community. I use interviewing as a technique routinely in my UX practice and interviewed people with widely varying attitudes and experiences. I took phrases I saw in social media. And I created texts. As the project was extended into a series produced by Lower Bottom Playaz in Oakland, my collaborator and producer, Ayodele, generously introduced me to people outside my own community. My interviews reached further from my own experience as she introduced me to others who conferred their trust in me to share their stories.

EC: What was the hardest part of designing this immersive experience?

CL: The trickiest part of The One Truthiness has been designing the post-show conversation. How do you create a context where people feel they can engage in public with each other about things that are usually—and for good reason—kept hidden within in-groups and are so filled with judgment and labels and polemics? I found that the text serves the role of being the brave person to first voice something. That leaves the audience participants free to respond or clarify or add to, instead of having to take the risk themselves.

I also had concerns about the comfort level of audience members' reading, so although the book and the text is passed from one audience member to the other, I worked hard to frame the reading as optional so that no one was put on the spot (looked at or asked to speak).

EC: As we wrap up our conversation, I wanted to bring us back to how you weave your work and your art together. We talk all the time in interaction design about designing the "call to action." Was this a form of call to action to address racial (in)justice?

CL: Ayodele and I have discussed the call to action at great length. There is a history of white people having conversations about race that feel transformative, yet never turn into actually changing the systems at work. Is it enough to raise consciousness? Does that lead to people perceiving the world differently? To notice injustice they didn't before? To believe people they didn't believe before? To recognize opportunities to behave differently as individuals and to impact systems? Many audience members reported that those things did happen. We are neither didactic nor directive. We illuminate options, put them in context, and let each viewer/participant take that into the world.

I am not sure if my UX background influenced the show or if this has always been how I create my artwork and that that led me to a career in UX. I look for patterns. Individuals are where the action is—I hold space for individuals to exist within patterns. I call this the tension between the pattern and the person. More concretely, stories are told from one perspective or another but the dominant-pattern culture stories are expected to apply to everyone. Other stories are marginalized; they are called "special interest." So I ask: Why is our dominant culture always defined excluding BIPOC folks? Let's address the social context in which individuals exist and acknowledge that multiple social contexts constantly coexist.

Can we design different interactions? I think so. The One Truthiness has been a testing zone. I tried to make a portrait that had room for multiple perspectives and points of engagement. A safe space to be brave—to interact with others in a different way and see them through a different lens. To help us see our own perspective and experience as just one of many, and not of greater or lesser value.

Back to UX, to make change you have to be able to imagine an alternative. Racial justice is all about how we interact, with each other and with the systems and structures in our lives, how they shape us and how we shape them. That is experience design. Design is all about inviting others to notice. I tried to create an immersive experience for people to notice themselves and engage "otherness," specifically in the context of race. I wanted to design an experience that invites noticing.

My work has certainly led me to action. I felt overwhelmed in the face of abstract systems and the vagueness of "racism." Now I see opportunities to engage everywhere. The One Truthiness for me has been a bridge from theory to practice. And isn't that what we do in UX every day?

Beginning as a one-night workshop production at Kinetech Arts in San Francisco, in collaboration with Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, The One Truthiness has since become six different scripts with companion paintings and been experienced by more than 800 people. It has been performed in person and through video conference. It is a book and a freestanding video available to book groups to self-lead.

References

1. Bermudez, G. The social dreaming matrix as a container for the processing of implicit racial bias and collective racial trauma. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy (Jun. 2018), 1–23. DOI: 10.1080/00207284.2018.1469957; https://bit.ly/3jnV2fn

2. https://onetruthiness.com/about

3. Hsiao, I. Waxing poetic: Charlie Levin's paintings as performance. SF Weekly. Dec. 15, 2014; https://www.sfweekly.com/culture/waxing-poetic-charlie-levins-paintings-as-performance/

Author

Originally from the U.K., Elizabeth Churchill has been leading corporate research at top U.S. companies for over 20 years. Her research interests include designer and developer experiences, distributed collaboration, and ubiquitous/embedded computing applications. churchill@acm.org

Copyright held by authors
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2021 ACM, Inc.

Living Single: Charlie Levin at SFIAF

By Elizabeth Costello
Wednesday, May 11 2016
SF Weekly

“When you’re right and everyone else is wrong, there’s no room for anything else," says the artist Charlie Levin, who spent time in a community of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs "living together in conflict.”

The community’s schools teach children in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and they actively engage in conversations that frequently reveal opposing viewpoints. From this came Single Point Perspective: A Meditation on Race, Loss, Grief and The Other, a piece in which Levin uses wax pigments, a pane of glass, and a nonfiction narrative read by the audience to create a unique live experience — a performed painting, if you will.

Levin will perform Single Point Perspective at the Fort Mason Chapel, which features stained glass windows and a vaulted ceiling, as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which will bring together artists from across the Bay Area (and 12 countries) for three weeks of performances, lectures, and talk-backs.

Audiences entering the dimly lit space might note the smell of beeswax, one pleasant side effect of Levin’s practice of painting with wax — known as encaustic — a method that can be traced back to ancient Egypt. Levin will provide the audience with a text that includes her own writing interwoven with quotes that reflect a range of American assumptions about safety, power, and access to resources. As audience members take turns reading the text, Levin will paint on a backlit glass panel, creating and changing a visual character. Offering an evolving experience of seeing and listening, she invites the audience to consider multiple perspectives at once.

Having returned to Oakland just as the local reaction to the fatal police shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo., was in full swing, Levin was struck by the long-standing situation of different realities existing side-by-side in her own community.

"I was looking at the shootings and at the stories that are becoming more widely known about different experiences, such as violence, that are common [for some people] but seen as aberrations to others," she says. "[And I wondered] how you keep going in situations that don't have a quick fix. It requires a different kind of patience."

Levin cites perceptual artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin as influences. Her work looks very different from theirs, but she shares with them an invitation to audiences to reflect on the experience of seeing. In Single Point Perspective, she provides an environment that encourages a contemplative mode, and a willingness to avoid leaping to conclusions.

"[Our impression of an artwork] may provide a parallel to our first impression of a person," she says. "We don't know what anyone went through to get to where they are. When we learn more about a person, we see them differently. This performance is the inverse of seeing a finished painting. At the end, the audience will know what went into making it."

Levin's performance is not an improvisation, but neither is it a literal, illustrative response to the text that audiences will read (moving at the rate of one page per reader, Passover seder-style). Rather, each of her four performances will yield a different painting and a different experience for the audience.

"I come in with a plan in mind," Levin says. "But depending on the energy of the audience, I can paint lyrically or I can paint aggressively. In some ways, the performance has some aspects of dance."

Although other contemporary artists work with pigmented wax, Levin's particular combination of expressive modes is unique. She cut her teeth in Chicago's theater scene, where her company Local Infinity created work that combined performance and installation art, focusing on what Levin calls the body-to-body experience of performer and audience.

“We did things like use piles of dirt as a metaphor for home, and electricity for power,” Levin says. “We built suits that could be plugged in, manipulated 800 pounds of dirt, and we won an excellence award from the New York Fringe Festival for another show where we plunged a performer into molten wax. Things like that.”

Each of Levin’s performances will be followed by a talk-back moderated by Ayodele Nzinga of the Oakland theater company Lower Bottom Playaz, which fosters the creation of new work, supports theater artists at all stages of their careers, and produces existing plays that shed light on the lives of inner-city inhabitants. Levin will also participate in the SFIAF’s panel discussion about Black Lives Matter and the role of the artist in sociopolitical movements, moderated by educator, poet, and former Black Panther Party member Ericka Huggins.

Levin is in good company at this year's SFIAF, which features a truly eclectic lineup of theater, dance, music, and performances as hard to classify as Single Point Perspective. The festival emphasizes broad audience engagement by offering talk-backs, lectures, and family-oriented programming that invite us all to be open to sharing our views, and, perhaps more importantly, to listening to others.

“When we speak other people’s stories, we hold them in our mouths and we can start knowing what to look for and learning to listen,” Levin says. “I don't have answers, but I can offer a starting point for reflection.”

WAXING POETIC: CHARLIE LEVIN'S PAINTINGS AS PERFORMANCE

Posted By Irene Hsiao on
Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:50 AM
SF Weekly

The apocryphal etymology of sincerity has its origins in the idea of artistic perfection: that a well-chiseled marble sculpture would not require the sly application of wax to fill cracks or repair contours, thus, it was sine sera — “without wax.” 

This account of the word has been disproven, and artists working in encaustic techniques have similarly challenged wax’s association with defects. Among them is Charlie Levin, who applies wax to glass to create paintings that seem thickly textured and opaque as plaster, yet which, when lit, reveal more stories than a stained glass window. 

“The magic trick is about controlling transparency,” Levin says. 

She is describing the way her paintings show an entirely different image when they are lit from the front or behind, producing a visceral astonishment and perplexity that that the eyes could be so deceived about the nature of the object. Yet she could also be talking about the impact of her work, which produces layers of meaning that question what we can know about the world and those in it: stolid, seated figures on a neutral ground rise up and become muscular Blakean demigods wrestling one other or traversing a barren universe in her massive four panel painting SecondSight (2003), a pale face darkens and broods in a portrait, a mirrored surface in which you see the full length of your body becomes a skeleton in one of the eight panels of Face2Face (2011) — an x-ray, a memento mori, a reminder of the generic and the strange that lurks beneath the surface of all mortal things. 

Despite the complexity of her images, Levin says:

“The end result of the painting is not the point. It is only an artifact. The way I see life is that we are the product of our experiences, including who we are born as, and our families, and our environment, and the things that happen to us. When you meet somebody, you can’t see that. You see little bits and pieces. And they change, and we change.”

Consequently, painting for Levin is a process rather than a product, an art form that has found a natural outlet in performance. As a student majoring in art and philosophy, Levin had the realization that, rather than creating static images, she could create immersive environments in which the viewers walking through would become the figures of the painting. 

“It’s all about the body,” she explains. “It’s not a room of stuff that people get to see; it’s about the interaction of your body in this space.” 

An early installation The Square Root of Infinity (1992), created in collaboration with a dancer and a musician for a course called “Dance and the Related Arts,” whetted her appetite for fortuitous intersections of movement and visual art. This lead Levin to seek work with several Chicago theater companies, including Lookingglass Theatre, before establishing Local Infinities Visual Theater in 1996 with collaborator Meghan Strell. 

It was in a Local Infinities piece called Wax and Wayne (2002), in which Levin and Strell used 200 pounds of wax to tell an adaptation of the myth of Pygmalion, that Levin realized the act of painting itself could become a performance. Levin painted the story in colored wax on a clear, human-sized panel of Plexiglas, gradually replacing a white form with the blushing figure of the living sculpture Galatea. 

“The point is that the image itself changes and changes, each time leaving pieces and parts that overlay each other. The result is something completely different, made of the sum of its parts.” Performing the piece at the Oerol Festival of Site-Specific Theater in the Netherlands, Levin discovered the play of light she calls “the magic,” which touched off her investigation in encaustic painting. 

Her Berkeley studio is still littered with experiments in wax — nubbins and curls erupting from the aluminum tins like petrified sea creatures neatly categorized by color and opacity, and studies in white wax colored by opaque titanium and transparent zinc on oblong lengths of glass arranged like a series of microscope slides. 

Based in the Bay Area since 2010, Levin has exhibited work at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, the Oakland Art Murmur, and the Performance Art Institute, as well as created installations for CODAME, The Wayfinders Performance Group, The Decameron at Fort Mason, and China Lounge in Pleasanton. Earlier this year, she collaborated with technology and performance company Kinetech Arts in TheOtherSight, a performance on surveillance in which panels from SecondSight served as a moving set that exposed visual secrets as it was washed over by digital flames and water ripples. On Tuesday, Levin previews a work-in-progress performance of her own, Single-Point Perspective: The One Truthiness. Using the transparency and mutability of wax to tell a visual story in live painting that considers our ability to recognize other bodies as our own, Levin reminds, in this, as well as her whole oeuvre, that a picture presents the illusion of a world in which all things can be perceived, though it exists within a world in which perspective limits our understanding. 

Kinetech Arts Featured Artist Program presents Charlie Levin in "Single-Point Perspective: The One Truthiness" at 8:30 p.m. on December 16 at KUNST-STOFF arts, 1 Grove St., S.F. Admission is free; $5 suggested donation.