The Mansion Inn has lay abandoned and empty for the past decade. That all changed this summer when creator Marisa Kolokotronis, a St. Francis alumni, executed her idea to showcase an immersive visual and performing arts exhibit and festival on the hotel’s barren walls before the hotel gets torn down and a new one takes its place.
Tearing Walls Apart began in early August with an application process, but Kolokotronis said her plan began last November and took months to put to put together. She did so with the help of many local sponsors, like Leave Your Mark Sacramento, The Grupe Company, and SKK Developments.
The show was available to all students in the County of Sacramento. It appealed to Sacramentan artists of all shapes, sizes, and mediums. Each team, of up to six members, was assigned to a room and had total creative control of the room and could decorate it any way they pleased as long as it coincided with the overarching theme of unity.
My experience in Tearing Walls Apart consisted of months of preparations and planning with my team. My team, Blake Aboueljoud (‘21), Mackenzie Crall (‘20), Michael Alongi (‘21), Carenna Thompson (‘21) and myself came up with the idea for our piece to be centered around sexual assault awareness. We were able to do so with the help of the wonderful Mrs. Morrison, McClatchy’s 3D Art teacher. She was an inspiring asset, and helpful mentor to our group.
Last year, the surfacing of new information in the rape case of a student here at C.K.M. sparked a student-led walkout devoted to coming together and giving administration the message that the way the case was dealt with can never happen again. We shared our stories and experiences and grew closer together as a school. Because of these events, we wanted to dedicate our piece to sexual assault awareness and acknowledge where our school went wrong, and that we, as the student body, won’t make the same mistakes in the future.
The piece itself was a room painted entirely black with white intersecting lines spread out on both the walls and the floor, with a figure composed entirely out of tape in the center of the room. The figure, known to our group as Tape Cole II, named after the model, was shaped in a very closed-off and curled up position, with only an arm reaching out. All over the four walls, set in the intersections of the white lines, were tape hands, all extended out towards the tape figure. The tape hands represented support systems and how even in our hardest times, we still have people that love and are there for us.
The room only took about a day and a half to assemble, as we had been working on the hands and figure for months prior to the event. Each hand was constructed by wrapping tape around our hands with the sticky side facing upwards, followed by layers upon layers of tape, and then removed from our hands by cutting it off and taping together to cut pieces. To make the figure, we used a willing volunteer to spend hours in a morph suit, the one and only Cole Eames (‘20), and wrapped him in layers of tape.
On Sunday, September 23rd, the Tearing Walls Apart Festival consisted of numerous live performances, including our own Carenna Thompson, who closed out the festival with a few of her original songs accompanied by acoustic guitar. At the award ceremony, our group received the award for “Most Creative Use of Materials.”
We were very honored to be apart of such an inclusive program, with creative artists and students like ourselves. Tearing Walls Apart was truly a unifying experience for creative students all around Sacramento, and helped us all come together and truly tear walls apart for the sake of art.