When visitors enter Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, they will hear the singing of Diana Marto. If they follow that voice through the main gallery and into a side room, they will see the words that Marto is singing, painted on the walls and ceiling, white lettering against deep purple.
The vocal of simple words and phrases — “Astonishing,” “Inconsolable,” “Smoothed and “Polished” — is usually taped, but on Saturday, Dec. 29, Marto plans to be inside the purple room performing a sound immersion experience called “A Stone Is Singing.”
“It’s about the journey of being alive and working through the human condition,” said Marto, 74, who will deliver all of this in one 10-minute show, which means those who want to experience the work better be there at 3 p.m. sharp.
Marto is a performance artist who also paints at her studio in Emeryville. Prone to standing on top of her paintings and even ripping them up in front of viewers, she has been taking voice lessons for two years to add a third dimension to her performance.
If this seems like a lot of work for 10 minutes of song, but Marto will give longer performances on the weekend of Jan. 12-13.
“I think of it as a sound bath,” she says. “People are invited to sit down in the room and become immersed in this sonic, visual experience.”
“A Stone Is Singing” is the latest in a 27-part canto that goes back to 1982 when Marto was studying choreography in colonial Hong Kong. Because she was living in an illegal unit, the local rent control board dealt with it in customary fashion, which was to arrive early in the morning with sledgehammers and crowbars. Given three months to leave on account of being an American ignorant of the law, she used the time to create a ceremonial performance piece based on her eviction.
An image of her dancing with a 40-foot roll of calligraphy paper made it onto the front page of the Sunday newspaper, the South China Morning Post, and she was on her way to “Canto XXVII,” making its world premiere in West Marin.
In preparation, she made a pilgrimage back to Asia in October. While she was walking an ancient stone path to a waterfall, the artistic theme of “A Stone Is Singing” came to her.
“The path was steep, there wasn’t any railing and I didn’t even have a walking stick,” she says. “I realized that the stone is me. I’ve been smoothed and polished by life.”
Total immersion takes no more than 20 minutes, but there is other art to look at before and after. To reach Marto’s sound bath, visitors must pass through Bruce Mitchell’s carved wood sculpture and then exit through an ecological group show called “Earth/Unearth.”
“Diana Marto: A Stone Is Singing, Canto XXVII”: Painting and performance art. 2:30-5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 29. Free. On view 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Monday. Closed Tuesdays. Through Feb. 3. Gallery Route One, 11101 Highway 1, Point Reyes Station. Reservations suggested. 415-663-1347. www.galleryrouteone.org
