Be My Blood Brother - March 3, 2011 Performance

Be My Blood Brother, Performance (5 hours), 3-11-11, Atlanta, GA

Yesterday marked the inaugural performance of Be My Blood Brother (or Blood Brothers) at the ACA Sculpture Gallery in Atlanta, GA from 11am-4pm. I now have 25 more Brothers in my Family Tree.

The next performance will coincide with the March 11th Castleberry Hill Art Stroll at the Granite Room during the Paint By Numbers group show. Please, mark your calendar. I want to be your Brother. Each performance starts a new branch of the Family Tree. The more performances you attend, the more more you become connected to the new members of the Family.

My press release went something like this:

Nathan Sharratt’s latest public injunction, Blood Brothers, invites viewers to participate in the time-honored ritual of bonding by blood. Sharratt will present several ingredients for a traditional entertainment-centric blood analog, conspicuously combine them and apply the solution to a dull knife blade. The viewer and the artist will then commence with the ritual action of palm cutting and clasping, begging the question, is blood truly the strongest bond? Each brother will receive a certificate of brotherhood and be included into that performance's Family Tree.

Ingredients included Father, Mother, Ancestor (Paternal),
Ancestor (Maternal), and Purity

Mechanical Bloodlines

I took the photographs that would become Mechanical Bloodlines (formerly Nick Plus Dad Equals) over Columbus-Day Weekend in 2004. Nick was four at the time. This was the same weekend I took the Family Portraits. I had borrowed a Holga from a co-worker at Laptop Magazine.

While I've had the Family Portraits printed since 2004, I only recently went back to the negative box and scanned these images of Nick amongst our father's machinery, after I realized that even back then I was beginning to explore concepts of family structure and bonds.

The idea at the time was to find connections, and a big one was my father's plethora of vehicles and machinery, which he uses to maintain the campground that my family owns and operates outside Cooperstown, NY. I'm not sure if I was consciously using Nick as a surrogate for myself or not. You might notice that my father isn't in any of the images, even the one taken inside the house with the rest of the family. He was usually out and about doing this or that around the campground or running errands to town. To this day he refuses to get a cell phone because it just means people will constantly be calling him to do stuff.

I've included a few outtakes from the shoot. While I really like the images, three pics of the firetruck is redundant.

I may end up including this one in the series. There's something about the double exposure and the expressions on Nick's faces, from exuberance to crankiness. Nick had a cold at the time so he was constantly carrying around a handkerchief with a rocking horse on it. He had rubbed his nose so much that it was becoming red and inflamed.

It's interesting that at the beginning of my quest for an artistic voice, I sought out my family, and it took another six years to come back to them. Sometimes we need to explore the world before we realize there's no place like home.