The Through Line - Fall 2014

The title – Never Finished – may be in part an exasperated sigh to the feeling of the work for the piece never ending, but LILIENTHAL|ZAMORA’s new installation at Suyama Space also takes its name from its composition.

“I think we’re looking at one slice of something that goes on and on and on,” says Ben Zamora, who earned his MFA in Lighting Design from the University of Washington School of Drama in 2005 and is one half of LILIENTHAL|ZAMORA, a collaborative creative team working primarily in sculptural light installation. We’re sitting inside Suyama Space, looking at Never Finished just days before its public opening, and talking about the genesis and circumstances of the work. In addition to his work as part of LILIENTHAL|ZAMORA, Ben is a faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts (previously at Seattle University) and is a freelance lighting designer for theatre and opera.

Never Finished is a companion piece to the duo’s 2012 installation at the Frye Art Museum, Through Hollow Lands. During the creation of the Frye installation, Ben says, “I felt pulled in multiple directions. Emotionally, this new piece resonates with that time. There’s a lot of tension; a lot of things pulling at each other.”

I ask Ben how it is creating a piece that he brings a lot of personal experiences to, but is part of a collaboration with another artist – and...

“A playwright picks out images. A playwright can talk to someone for ten hours and get a really good story out of them. There are probably a lot of people who can do that – a therapist, a sociologist, a journalist,” muses playwright Karen Hartman, new Senior Artist in Residence at the University of Washington School of Drama. She continues, “A playwright is then going to pull out the images and string together a distilled narrative. It won’t cover everything, but it will give the audience a sense of who that person is.”

Karen’s current projects all have their foundations in documentary sources. These three distinct plays are perhaps coincidentally connected thematically, but purposefully connected by Karen’s selection of source material type. The first project, The Book of Joseph, was commissioned by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and is scheduled for production there in 2016. The commission was inspired by a collection of letters written between 1939 and 1941 to Joseph Hollander, a young Jewish man who had escaped Poland. The letters, published as a book, Every Day Lasts a Year, were from Hollander’s family, left behind in Krakow, and were rediscovered by his son, Richard Hollander, many years later.

“There were these three generations of really interesting men, and I wanted to write about all of them...