Consenses can be thought of as an artistic game of “Telephone” using every medium of art as a language through which to grow a broader understanding of the world around us. At Consenses, we believe that the nuances of our individual experiences are lost when we use spoken word alone to express ourselves and that more can be revealed working together than fighting for the validity of our singular and limited beliefs.
There are no right or wrong answers here, just different angles of perspective on a greater Truth.
Education: Consenses has developed a unique, multidisciplinary arts curriculum for the classroom setting in which students collaborate to create “Consenses Interpretive Chains.” Each week, students focus on a different medium (photography, music, dance, sculpture, poetry, painting) and use one another’s art from the previous week, as a catalyst for their own creations. In this 10 Module (18-class) course, students are given the tools and confidence they need to extract the essence of a piece of art and express their own interpretation of it in a new way.
Ultimately these multisensory “Interpretive Chains” (which show the transformation of a photo into a song into a dance into a sculpture into a poem into a painting) nurture a different understanding about how the world becomes. Just as the essence of each piece of art passes through the consciousness of multiple students to form a “Consenses Interpretive Chain,” so too does the essence of truth strain itself through each of our collective consciousness to form our reality. In Consenses’ Curriculum, students learn tolerance and empathy through “listening” to others, not through words, but through various art forms.
Exhibitions: Through Consenses, artists from around the world, of every medium and genre, are brought together though they never meet. Each are asked to interpret one another’s artwork in the vein of a game of “Telephone” and express it in their own medium.
For example: a musician interprets a photograph, a dancer interprets their song, a painter interprets the dance, a perfumer interprets the painting, a poet interprets the perfume and so on until all five senses are represented. In this process, each artist is given seven days to extract the essence of the artwork they are provided and use this work as the catalyst for their own creation, ultimately expressing their raw reactions in the language of their own medium. None of the artists are privy to the identities of the other participants.
This process has formed what Sally has termed Interpretative Chains: a collective, holistic statement; an intriguing procession from one piece to the next; the revealing of a unique glimpse into the artistic process and the complexity of perception.
Exhibitions, showcasing Sally’s Consenses collaborations, are on display in nationally renowned museums and ask visitors to consider each art work through the eyes of the artist that interpreted its predecessor and to interpret each chain as a whole.. In this way, visitors become part of the artistic conversation, the last in the Consenses interpretive line.