Totality Project 2024
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in my creative experiment. As a community, we manifested collective healing and an overall improved state of being. This canvas was then sanctified, and intuitively painted during the Great American Eclipse.
Totality Project by Kelly Ann Swartz
The Totality Project is a seven step, interactive, time-based community art project that was completed on April 8th, 2024, during totality of the Great North American Eclipse.
About 6 weeks before the historic celestial event, I was brainstorming how to commemorate and visually memorialize the upcoming experience. I researched the Merriam Webster definition of totality, external to scientific context, and realized whatever I made would not be completed alone.
Over the past few weeks leading up to totality, I asked salon and gallery visitors to interact with the project in any way they found healing.
Many shared dreams, wishes, prayers, or personal intentions to manifest in the life after totality.
The entire experience was humbling & emotional, thank you so much for trusting me with your personal thoughts and deepest corners of your soul.
Before the eclipse, the canvas was blessed & intentions of positive energy, completion, release, and love were infused into the canvas.
Then, in the moments before and after totality, the canvas was intuitively painted with respect for the words underneath. Interestingly, the only visible text remaining is the project outline in my own handwriting.
The Totality Project has since arrived back at HiLites Salon & Art Gallery where it will remain until though 2024. I truly believe the words here doesn’t properly capture the powerful essence of this vast existence.
From this experience, I feel thankful, blessed, inspired.
Thank you so much to everyone who has visited the salon space, engaged with my visual art, even had something nice to say.
Iceland 2026
A few months back, I learned about the “Iceland Eclipse Festival” taking place in August 2026.
Although there was no official “Call for Art,” I still sent information about the Totality Project - a commemorative and archival art project inspired by the great North American eclipse and completed in April of 2024.
I proposed to do another “Totality Project” - this time in Iceland, for this large-scale festival. I was envisioning a large Installation which will be completed in the days leading up to, and during the eclipse.
In early November, the committee reached out with an invitation to not only complete this project in Iceland, but to join their global network of artists & explorers who continue the tradition of celestial gatherings.
Totality Project
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