opening walls - closing windows

April
October

We started dismantling the Habitats for Artists located at Spire Studios last week. Above are images that bookend the existence of my hab. Below are images of the dismantling of the structure. Matthew Slaats helped me take it down. Interacting with Simon on this project has been rewarding. Time spent in my hab was less that I'd hoped, but it did provide some quality secluded time, and conveniently so. It has brought to the fore thoughts on the true essentials for my artmaking experience, as well as the nature of space, and ownership of space, both financial, and aesthetic. Also of paramount importance for me was the reflection on impermanence, as so much thought in life- and in art- is given to the importance of permanence. Permanence is simply an indeterminate impermanence, after all, and much of what is sold, including art, is accompanied by the illusion of permanence. I struggle with my own reliance on the security that permanence provides, but I feel it ever more important to me in my practice to strip away this crutch. If you buy something, you want your money's worth and you want it to last. If you spend your life in an endeavor [art], you want it to account for something, you want it to endure. Would it not be for nought if nothing comes of all this effort? Get over it. Nothing is, nor should be a precious as this very moment - except the one immediately following it. As I'm writing this I'm that this is one of the lessons of my time in my habitat over this Summer, and I think those lessons are present in the depletion drawings I made inside the space.


This first Summer at Spire was really the preamble to the project. As new habs are formed out of the recycled materials from this first group, and new artists are thrown into the mix in future incarnations (we delivered a reconstituted hab to The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, where it will stay for two years, and another will be going to the Scenic Hudson site - Poet's Walk in the coming week.) will deepen and become more exciting visually, and conceptually as a vehicle for exchange between artists and communities. The structures themselves will embody the six degrees of separation paradigm in an unplugged facebook for artists, linked through the transitory experience in an ever changing space.