Meet Vanessa Tiegs
Greetings & Welcome!
I'm often asked what Venus Geist means and where & how I got this name. In point of fact, Venus Geist is the translation of my full name: Van-ESSA, an alternate spelling of Venus, denotes the essence of the Sacred Feminine, and Tiegs, an anagram of German Geist, means spirit, genius or ghost.
I am a performance artist. I strive to live every day as though it were my last, consciously pursuing beauty, value & meaning.
My artistic career began at age 15 as the youngest corps de ballet member of The Zurich Ballet performing under the artistic direction of the perfectionistic legendary Rudolf Nureyev on world-class stages in ballets: "Manfred," "Don Quixote," "Petrouchka," and "La Conservatoire." I experienced through my very eyes, the most demanding physical standards of classical technique & spiritual artistry ever set forth together in a cultural medium dedicated to storytelling the mythological undercurrents scoring the endless plight of humanity, which is the individual's pursuit of fulfillment at the highest cost humanly possible. Hence, ballet taught me the value of a life lived meaningfully & devotedly, even while dreaming in night's shadow, "La Sonnambula."
In my mid-teenage years, I performed classical piano to further express my passion for the music of my favorite composers: Chopin, Schubert & Rachmaninoff. My quest for Plutonic-Venusian virtuosity led me to name & represent a worldwide art movement created from a taboo medium considered to be a big "socially suicidal" No-No. Because I could not carve art out of my bones or mold it with my flesh, I translated the spirit of the plasma running in my blood into what I called my journal of "Pain-Things." My final collection of 88 Menstrala provocatively fuel ad hominems, memes & emotionally charged responses from society. Nevertheless, my devotion to creating inspiring meaningful art serves one goal: to honor the Sacred Feminine. My performances, art works, and mythological biography express my soul assignment: to fulfill my name, Venus Geist, with spiritual integrity this given lifetime.
Becoming A Photographer Was Nature's Calling
When I was a 10, my father had a dark room & showed me how he developed photographs from negatives, the hard, time-consuming, & now forgotten old-fashioned way.
In 2010, I rented my own photography studio in Oakland, California. Using a state of the art Digital SLR (the Canon EOS 7D), I committed to photographing my dog, Vivi, for 365 consecutive days. The following year, 2011, I published her book, a true labor of love, with editorial attention & caring dedication to what I had found as the purest joy in my life - the playfulness so intrinsic to the age of innocence. Vivi was my loving playmate. We lived each day excitedly, as I froze my time with her. A few thousand of my several thousands of photographic split second memories were publically shared with the world as millions of views on the digital cloud of Flickr.
Getty Images, Avanti Press, and a U.K. press licensed some of my photographs of Very Vivi.
In 2012, my photo series, "Vivi's Ballerina Dreams," were chosen to become the poster campaigns for Dancers Love Dogs, a not-for-profit organization in South Africa raising money for mass sterilizations of homeless & sheltered dogs on the streets of Cape Town, Durban & Johannesburg. In their frequently used poster photo, I wear on my right foot the ballet pointe shoe worn by Gelsey Kirkland in her 1976 performance of "La Sylphide" at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, New York.
In visiting Ms. Kirkland backstage after her performance, she gifted me her worn pair of pointe shoes, and being a 10-year old little girl aspiring to become a ballerina too, I brought tears to her eyes as I left telling her, "I promise, Miss Kirkland, I'll take care of your pointe shoes & turn them into a gift that keeps on giving." Since 2012, her cherished pointe shoes have become a memento spreading joy to many and assistance to thousands & thousands of homeless dogs throughout South Africa.
A Photographer's Passion For Dance
Having had a mother who was a ballet dancer, I learned how to perform professionally & then kept my eye for detail in photographing dancers I coached. One of my students joined the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in New York. Her Venus Geist portraits that I created for her are virtual photographs deriving from a series of headshots that I took of her in my studio.
Other Creative Pieces of My Life
I've also tried my hands at model building (interning at Robert A.M. Stern Architects & Skidmore Owings & Merrill in NYC before constructing my own miniature set designs called Miniarcs). But the most fascinating subject I apply myself to is the language of our star dome. I love astrology to its core, in all its schools of thought with all their techniques. I learned Hellenistic Astrology while travelling in Europe throughout the 90's. After settling back in the States in 2000, I began integrating Evolutionary Astrology into my daily practice. In June 2012, during a Venus Occultation, I met my Transcendental Karmic Astrologer, Zsuzsanna Griga, from Budapest. Today, my antennae are tuned to Vedic Astrology, and my mind expands with experiential evidence helping me to actualize my North Node of the Moon, Rahu. Located conjunct my Descendant, my axis of double destiny requires that I ground myself daily in the real world, not in the etheric dreamworld. But in my decoding of our night sky, I realize that our Moon is not what we have been taught, which is why the moon keeps laser-precise Time in our Saturn-Moon matrix. So, I invented Monthmatics, a visual clock face telling phasal time which puts any person's life time within the context of any chosen cycle. Now in its final phase before programming, Monthmatics will assist individuals in knowing, in real time, the energetic currents of their natal placements, transits, and solar magnetic rays. putting any uploaded life data timestamp onto the one blockchain now scaling indefinitely.
Thank you sincerely for your time.
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Vanessa Tiegs, M.A.
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