My City Was Gone|What is ever lost? Mapping Place and "Space with Freespace

Matthew Slaats is not a fellow who is ever wanting for a way to fill his down time.  He concluded the Hyde Park Visual History Project last October with a long awaited interactive projection at the Hyde Park Drive In and now he's fully involved in the Midddle Main Revitalization effort, working to leverage artistic activity to invigorate the cultural and economic life in a stretch of Poughkeepsie's Main St.

Matthew's work is interactive and participatory.  His impulse is toward community building and he engenders that in activities which are engineered to pool the knowledge, experience and creativity of a given community.

His latest project is an online and real world project called Freespace.  The website of Freespace seeks to generate a network of sites of of significance - of personally held significance as opposed to significance on an institutional or national scale.  The nature of the project is open ended and will ultimately be determined by the aggregated character of submissions by the public, and the site will map those locations and experiences and individual's experiences tied to that location.   As stated in the website's About section, the impetus for the project arose out of a visit to the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park as a way to spur a sort of National Park System that reflects the American experience of the common individual.  The project is a cataloging of the relationships built between people and place.
When Matthew sent the link and an invitation to participate I was reading James Fallows' article How America Can Rise Again in The January 2010 issue of The Atlantic and the pairing felt particularly synchronous.
In the article, Fallows questions several individuals on the state of the nation's well being and tracks the attitude that's been ingrained in the American psyche since its infancy that the society's high point has passed and the downhill slide is underway.  Fallows' inquiry takes stock our current state and indexing the values of today's society against the real and perceived visions of our history.  Freespace is a similar activity, codifying the involuntary habit we all have of staking claims on our surroundings based on our experiences and emotions.  Freespace charts this new territory in land we all already to navigate it with new insight;
it's just one particular approach on remaking the concept of the commons.  Stake a claim, then open it up for your neighbors to enjoy and share.

The incredible nearly-edible ephemeral sculptural material

As I was trying to formulate the plaster version of Ground Cover for the In the Spirit of the Text exhibit in Nov, I began testing possible materials in which to cast the herringbone pattern. One option was hot dogs, which is still a possible option for future incarnations, but my initial test didn't give me an immediate desired effect. After casting the small tile below, I deposited the hot dogs used back in the freezer for possible future use.

Angelika couldn't understand what the white stuff was on the hot dogs as she was grilling them up on my birthday earlier this week.

I must become more diligent in distinguishing which household items are serving a greater purpose than that which they were originally intended. I did consider making a meal of the weiners as an oblique reference to John Baldessari's painting ash brownies but decided against both the action and the consumption.

my little finger sausages.

In the Habit - at

I kicked off the holiday weekend working in the hab. Doing some more quick brush studies and then tacking some swimming pool fragments to the outside of the structure. I began placing a simple grid 2x2" grid with the intention of using it as a platform for further sculptural additions to the skin.
As with most work I do, plan very little before hand, and try to develop as I go. That's what happened here. As I spend time in the habitat, I find myself concious of what I'm doing in there. Is it different from what I would do elsewhere? No, not really. Should it? Maybe, perhaps not. When I consider the space, I know I want it to be evolving, not static, functional, and hopefully dynamic.
How it's adorned, and how it's used will change. As I was tooling around with my shards of blue plastic, (shards that have been sitting on a shelf for nearly two years, therefore I'm happy to put them to some use, thereby validating my sometimes compulsive aversion to throwing out) creating little dimensional paintings, I was weighing the validity of a decorative vs. functional exterior modification. I had early on figured that I would want to incorporate some retractable work surface on the outside of the structure, and I realize for practical reasons, I could certainly use it. Where would I put it? When a clear componant of this process is that the structure is a sculpture, where should the art end and the design begin. Should every inch of this place be useful - functional? Yes. But would that not simply a be a beautiful shack, and a bit of easthetic exploration for its own sake, is that not valid?
These are internal diatribes that fire back and forth in an instant when I'm working. They are not profound probings, and not worth much of a mention here except that as with the previous post serve to triangulate myself on the path of process. Whether many others read this, I will eventually, and it will add context for me.

Kamp Maykr review

Here are a couple of images of Michael Natiello's mowed grass piece that was part of last weekend's Kamp Maykr project on the grounds of our apartment in Beacon. Over at maykr.com, I've posted some images of the other pieces from Kamp Maykr as well as the happenings at Spire Studios that were happening at the same time.

The brunch we held on Saturday was really enjoyable, and the weather was excellent. I appreciate all of the artists that participated in the project, and I'm grateful to everyone that came by on Saturday morning. It's a positive reminder of why I continue to throw these types of things together; interacting with and being inspired by other artists' takes, and pushing myself to step out of my normal habits of seeing and making.

Just as Meatballs had its sequels, so too will Kamp Maykr. Stay tuned.

And, you're soaking in it

I've been hashing through pieces for my upcoming show out in Colorado in November. I'm doing the show with my buddy Marc Wilhite who just moved back out to Denver from Boston.
The show is a meditation of sorts on a series of speeches written by Italo Calvino that are collected together in the book Six Memos for the Next Millenium. In this collection, Calvino explores five elements (he died prior to writing on the sixth piece) that lend to the timelessness of certain works of literature.

The process of developing this show has been a challenge for me conceptually. We're certainly not interested in creating a series of visual examples to illustrate Calvino's concepts. The exhibit is being called In the Spirit of the text, and that is really how we're working; within the spirit of the considerations that characterized Calvino's approach to both his own work and the appreciation he felt for the work of other writers.

Outside of the specific elements dealt with in the writings, I've been considering the notion of how knowledge and even taste, are passed along and experienced, and how much do we rely on secondary sources to gain our sense of the world. I've been thinking of our society's arbiters of taste or morals and how we absorb knowledge through primary experience or filtered through these arbiters and aggregators - the Oprahs, self help gurus, and John Tesh's of the world. And as artists we process this stuff into application that find their way into the our work.

From that strain of thought, I've been ruminating on how I pick up and absorb snippets of visuals or ideas in my working process. It's like an open ended, scavenger hunt where one discovery or clue opens the door to the next one, creating a zig zag trail of significance within the resulting work.

In one aspect of this current work, this meandering path has led from thinking of the relationship between literature and visual art, and they can stand on equal footing side by side. On top of that, I looked at a passage in one of the memos where Calvino bemoans the inexactitude with which language is oft employed. That ineffectual use of language led me to look at the jumble of letters that arrive in my mailbox as the subject lines of spam. I've been noting these subject lines for sometime for their bizarre, funny language, and often abstract letter combinations.
ligature studies, gouache on paper, 3" x 8"
In the process of applying this spamwerk to the task of creating work, I happened to listen to a podcast lecture given by font designer, Matthew Carter at SVA. Carter spoke of ligatures and construction component in fonts.to an instance where he developed a font in response to text he saw in the paintings of Mantegna, the process of assessing and absorbing elements of similarly ...With all of this in my mind, I learned via Bad at Sports of the 50th Anniversary of the Helvetica font and so it goes.

This trail is indeed meandering, but it's paramount to my reading of Calvino's Six Memos, and the way I'm approaching the exhibit as an appreciation of discriminating immersion. The thrust of my sentiment is that as a critic of writing, Calvino is foremost a lover of writing, a metabolizer of literature. In his Memos, Calvino doesn't enumerate the commandments of writing, rather I feel, he's sharing his joys of his immersion in the stuff. It's the trip you take in the soup, and when you're in it everything's in the mix. With experience and discipline, one is able to discern what sticks, and what gets carried downstream.

I'll get into more of this later, but this sheds a bit of light onto where I'm at currently with this work.