Drawing Performance Project

Can beauty save the world?

2011-02-28T05:28:00.000-08:00

Andrey Avinoff: In Pursuit of Beauty

February 26- July 24, 2011

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot says' " In that face- there is much suffering... Beauty like that is strength." Physical beauty, like the fleeting blue iridescence on the brown wings of the male apatura ilia butterfly Avinoff studied, is a visible metaphor of time, transformation, joy, sorrow, love, longing, and loss. Avinoff is a man that understood and expressed both the beauty and suffering of the world as an artist, scientist, and human being. The tender grace in Avinoff's Vaslav Nijinsky: Spectre de la Rose, 1947 in some ways is more beautiful and powerful than the 1916 Cubist portrait of the young Nijinsky. Gravity-defying leaps are recalled by the perfect frail gesture of the dancer's hand as he holds a fading rose. There is a look of knowing in the eyes of the elder Nijinsky that reveals memories and wisdom not yet realized or even lived in the pride of the 1916 image.

This is the Army is a drawing that questions assumptions of beauty, gaze, power, and gender. This drawing is exhibited next to cases of butterflies and watercolors where flowers, insects, color, and energy become free, bold, and grow wings to paraphrase Mikhail Kuzmin's 1906 novel Wings. The irony, humor, and unspeakable grace and gentle beauty of This is the Army reminds the viewer that somewhere in the history of western art we have forgotten how to see the human body as a wonder of nature.

Can beauty save the world? Can we even see it? Solzhenitsyn said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize," perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light-yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.... perhaps art, literature, can in fact help the world of today."

So perhaps, if we can see the wonder of beauty and not try to control it, preserve it, or utilize it for power over others, it can indeed help us. Avinoff suggests to understand "the nature and soul," of creatures one must study their creative efforts with a sympathetic, careful observation whether this is the study of butterflies or our fellow human beings.

2010-11-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

The River Runs Two Ways
Artwork by Sherrard Bostwick
Exhibition in Upper Gallery
September 12-October 24, 2010
Hoboken Museum
1301 Hudson Street
Hoboken, New Jersey 07030

Spring River

by Sherrard Bostwick

2010. Digital C print on metallic paper, 7 x 5 in.

2010-11-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

River Angels

by Sherrard Bostwick
2010, Digital C print on metallic paper, 5 x 7 in.

2010-11-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

Who Will Save Them

by Sherrard Bostwick
2010. Digital C print on metallic paper, 7 x 5 in.

2010-11-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Winter

by Sherrard Bostwick
2010. Digital C print on metallic paper, 12 x 12 in.

2010-11-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

Open Door

by Sherrard Bostiwck
2010. Digital C print on metallic paper, 7 x 5 in.

2010-11-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

Duty to Serve All

by Sherrard Bostwick
2010. Pastel and pencil on paper, 15.5 x 24 in.

2010-11-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

Autumn

by Sherrard Bostwick
2010. Digital C print on metallic paper, 7 x 5 in.

“I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine” by William Kentridge

2010-06-17T22:09:00.000-07:00

In “I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine”* William Kentridge scatters in frustration paper into the air, which falls into the hands of his own projected image. As sheets of paper are plucked from the screen as deftly as if by a ballet dancer, Kentridge, weighted down by his own mass and history, pauses to marvel at his graceful doppelganger. Kentridge creates what he calls the “provisionality of a moment.” The simple opposite of what is expected opens up a kaleidoscope of possibilities. The New Yorker quoted Kentridge saying,“ I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.” * In his work horses fall into pieces, texts lose their meaning, noses run away, beliefs disintegrate. Juggling optimism and nihilism, Kentridge nimbly balances on the brink of a vortex, vigilantly watching for any indication of truth.

PERFORMA, feedback loop

2010-06-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

In a CBC interview for "Wachtel on the Arts" (http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/4933370) the South African artist William Kentridge explains how his training in theater shaped his sensitivity to how the energy flows in an artwork. Kentridge, a member of the PERFORMA Curatorial Advisory Board and one of the many artists that performed during PERFORMA 09 in November, offers a clue to how to understand the PERFORMA's success. Founder RoseLee Goldberg has a talent for making good use of energy. How the energy flows from the themes, commissions, related performances, discussions, and writings literally into the streets of New York is awe inspiring to witness. My feeling is the force of PERFORMA is the connection between art making and cultural shaping as Sennett (see last entry) has observed. Goldberg’s skill is in how she carefully curates a series of performances to generate conversations about local issues with global significance. She selects biennial themes with deep historical roots that fuel contemporary ideas and actions. She commissions artists, often challenging them to explore a new form of expression or subject matter. These commissions become the core of the biennial conversation. The PERFORMA curators expand on these themes filling out the many faceted performance festival with nearly hundred related events. The dialog between the commissions and related work is then commented on by the growing community of written responses. The education events contextualize the biennial experience by supplying historical references and engaging discussions from which the seeds of future commissions grow. RG, as writer and historian, is able to activate and reflect on commissions simultaneously, like a cultural time warp feedback loop. The trick will be how to expand, follow the flow of energy, and be inclusive of new interest, while maintaining that deeply reflected core.

What is so compelling about performance art?

2010-06-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

Amazing is how completely surprised we are at the outcome of our own actions. We don’t even recognize our own creations after our individual activities have accumulated into patterns and cultural rituals. The sociologist Richard Sennett suggests a model, of how public life is constructed, can be extracted from the gestures a performer uses to convey a staged reality for the audience.” The connection between the staging of performance and how we perform the tasks that shape our society is what is so compelling about RoseLee Goldberg’s PERFORMA, an interdisciplinary arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists.* Every other year PERFORMA saturates New York City with performances, panels, and exhibitions for three weeks in November. For two biennials I have assisted with the education panels for PERFORMA as the performances seem to wake up the City and make it aware of itself.

What is so compelling about performance art? Performance studies how gestures, as Sennett suggests, shape our lives, our public spaces, our very thoughts. Performance serves up disorder and conflict in order to expose our willingness to continue to do things the way we have grown accustomed to doing them. It shows us we are making choices. We are agents participating in the creation of what we perceive as real, in the building cities, and in deciding what is important. Performance measures if we are generating or draining energy. It asks what meaning are we attributing to experience. Awareness of performance challenges what Sennett refers to, using de la Boétie’s phrase, as our “voluntary servitude.” It asks us not to foreclose experience, not to cling to certainty and security, but to be open to change, to be alert to potential, and to observe carefully where energy flows.

*Flesh and Stone: The Sociology of Richard Sennett, part one http://castroller.com/podcasts/CbcRadioThe2/1357158

*www.performa-arts.org

Arto Lindsay "SOMEWHERE I READ"

2009-11-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

Arto Lindsay opened PERFORMA 09 in Times Square last night with “Somewhere I Read.” The “multi-disciplinary arts parade” featured dancers and volunteer performers robed in tan trench coats parading to music from their cell phones composed by Lindsay himself. From overhead the string of performers resembled a khaki worm wiggling through a sea of Times Square crowds. The parade, from this view, appeared to be an animated line gracefully maneuvering through its contrasting audience. On the ground, the creature transformed into many individuals focused on the task of maintaining their patterns, solidarity and an element of distinction from onlookers. The parade was decidedly not viral, there was little or no encouragement for the audience to join in. At the very end, when the performers created a heap of abandoned phones, still sadly singing out for their dancers, the audience crowded around and stared down at the remains of the performance. It occurred to no one to grab a phone and lead their own parade.

The cell phone is the perfect instrument of paradox. It is at once social and anti-social, a tool for solidarity and solitude. We use it to speak to someone in public while ignoring everyone else. Lindsay’s parade was equally paradoxical. By parading in public the dancers attracted the attention of an audience, they then ignored. The cell phone is a great tool for drawing a line, as Lindsay did, between “we” and “them.” We use our phones to make public statements of inclusion and exclusion.

The writer Albert Camus gave his artist and rebel characters in Exile and the Kingdom the dilemma of sorting out solidarity and solitude. Camus links “we” and “them” by interest. When we become interested we are inclusive. Our disinterest produces exclusion. The actions or non-actions that follow our interest or disinterest, of course, have all kinds of moral ramifications. Camus suggests being interested in another’s suffering will draw us into solidarity with them. Camus gives the artist and the rebel the thankless task of increasing the self-awareness of our isolation.

So what of “Somewhere I Read”? From a distance it is a beautiful line in contrast and tension, a perfect design. Up close, the tension and difference is more problematic. It is the artist’s job to remind us of both.

Creating Openings

2009-10-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

In drawing we can begin with an idea-image and proceed to realize it. Or drawing can be an exploration of our awareness and thoughts. There is a dialog between what we see, touch and even hear, smell and taste and what conclusion we come to about these experiences. Creating is an opening between senses and thought. By creating we give ourselves time and space to reflect on our inner dialogs, the dialogs that are determining what we perceive.

Seeing Around the Mind

2009-09-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

I can see into the future, but just the near ‘what if’ future. I mistrust elaborating too far in my mind. As a small child I lived in my own fantasies, wandering far astray, entertaining and comforting myself. I now go just a little ways, before testing out a thought.

I admired great thinkers of critical thought that can imagine fabulous idea towers, piling thought on thought to crowning conclusions. But, one can get lost in a maze of ideas. Sometimes critical thinking is focused only outwards, judging and breaking down everything and everybody. The dislocated parts are then fitted into a much-defended system. The system’s creator is transformed into a tyrannical defender, violently disturbed by whatever the will cannot fit. Sometimes, the critical lens focuses only inwards immobilizing one with paralyzing feelings of inadequacy. In either case, the critical tool loses its value for seeing, and becomes a dictator protecting its ideas.

It is so frustrating the tools of the intellect are both our only means to process experience and a system that limits our insight. Where is the line that the mind crosses from insight to bully? The desire for knowledge seems to arise from some primeval need for protection from the unknown. And if the unknown can’t be understood, its disguised is defended until an acceptable explanation is found. Is there a way around this protection? Is there a way to see?

Tiamat

2009-03-06T21:26:00.001-08:00

Sherrard Bostwick, Tiamat, 2009
The Tiamat story of love, creation, chaos, control,
betrayal, death, destruction, creation

A drawing in pencil, pastel, pen and ink for 2,191 Days and Counting

Powerhouse Arena

March 5- March 22, 2009

37 Main Street DUMBO Brooklyn, NY

All proceeds will be donated to the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) Winter Soldier Project inspired by the courageous Vietnam veterans who came forward in 1971 to testify at the original
Winter Soldier investigation. IVAW is collecting soldiers’ firsthand accounts of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All veterans are invited to give testimony, regardless of their politics. The project will provide them with legal and mental health support.

Forming

2009-01-26T20:54:00.000-08:00

A drawing begins with a small mark. There is no certainty where the mark will lead. One only sees what is forming many, many marks later. The forming is a sort of blind faith in acting in the face of uncertainty. In the beginning, one just hopes that if each mark is made with care, the result will be sound.

Somehow these small actions, repeated with care, reverberate into wholeness. The oscillation of many careful gestures seem to be able to tame fear, brokenness, and destruction, the way a cat relaxes when stroked.

This entry is in memory of two lives lived with such care. Pete Lindsey and John Lisher taught me to take great care in even the smallest gesture. Care in the food we share, in all our interactions, in our surroundings, in everything we do, in every time we place something anywhere, in friendships, in community, in what we remember, in how we see the world. The courage and love of their care set a goodness in motion that continues to wash over us. Ocean waves precisely place each grain of sand on the beach. Snow flakes fall in just the right places. The smiles John exchanged on the Santa Cruz Mall or in Artisans Gallery continue to spread throughout the world. The joy Pete shared in each warming hour of growing light that takes us slowly from winter to the long days of summer, in every beat of a humming bird's wing, and in the sparkles that dance over glassy seas continues to grow. The things John and Pete did carefully have marked us with their enduring goodness forever. Thank you gentlemen.

Cofanetto

2009-01-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

A cofanetto is a small casket that was used as a vanity case for the toilet articles and personal treasures of Venetian Renaissance women. The cofanetto with the scrigno, a strong box used to store money, were kept locked in a woman’s bedchamber. Both boxes were embellished with fashionable allegories of the period evocative of beauty.

Recently, I saw a cofanetto in an exhibition of Venetian art influenced by Islamic tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like in the late sixteenth century Venice, Islamic influence is changing Europe and North America today. In the West we struggle with the acceptance of hijab and similar female practices of gender, beauty and modesty. The feminine and beautiful are so often entrenched cultural strongholds, sites of power and domination. A cofanetto capable of holding dissimilar views from many traditions intrigued me. By the appreciating of many traditions, can a woman escape the expectations and limitations of one? Who was the woman that opened the box in the privacy of her room, long before it was encased in a museum? What items did she keep inside to prepare herself for the outside world? How did she see herself and her world?

My wondering made me ask, if I could answer these questions even for myself about my own experiences, sensibility and time. What is needed to prepare to go outside? And how is the ambiguous boundary between inside and outside drawn? I invite you to open this cofanetto. The box and the hand-drawn animation you will discover within is a journey between in and out, cultural, psychological, political, as well as physical.

When I try to apprehend inside and out, I begin with my body. Simone de Beauvoir writes in Second Sex. “For, the body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another.” As both a daughter and a mother, looking in, is like pulling out threads that weave together all life. How does one separate the site of our beginnings from our mothers’ bodies or our bodies from the conception of our children? At what minute do children become separate, become themselves? Sometimes in the flow of life all that defines me, as a figure separated from the ground, is the knot of fear and resistance to life’s changes in my stomach.

If I try to empty myself of all the images of women that I have seen, I can’t make sense of the void. If the frames were empty like the ones on this cofanetto, who would I be? I have tried on many images, and mostly what I know of myself is the way they don’t fit. Mirrors, too, say little of whom one is, reflecting just a hint of oneself as the other.

Was there a clearer truth before we had eyes to see, when we were connected in the womb, inside of another? I imagine or can faintly remember the warmth of pulsing light and color. A place not quite remembered or perhaps conjured from our emptiness, where time returns us. Like a window without a wall, I cannot tell if I am looking in or looking out of this place. The traces of our searching for what is inside and our efforts to reach beyond ourselves are all we know of it. Beauty is then the fearlessness of our search, both fierce and graceful, to be ourselves and to forget ourselves.

The Flora Dora Girls Weekly Sewing Circle

2008-10-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

The Flora Dora Girls Weekly Sewing Circle

by Louis LaRusso II

Co-directed by Taylor Keith & Lillian Ribeiro

Featuring

Mary Lois Adshead, Kathi Carlson, Wendy Eaton, Eileen Gaughan, Angela Kariotis,

Susan Mirwis, Ellen O’ Neill, Florence Pape, Chelsea Lee Richardson, Margo Singaliese, and

Trish Szymanski

Hoboken Historical Museum and Cultural Center

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Two Readings @ Five and Eight o'clock

The Flora Dora Girls Weekly Sewing Circle (‘Flora Dora Girls’, Louis LaRusso II’s pet name for his mom, Mary, and her fistful of friends), is Louis LaRusso II’s loving tribute to the strength and solidarity of the hard-working, passionate, and funny women who labored in the sweatshops together in the working-class city of Hoboken circa 1965. They come together for a weekly sewing circle, the one place where they didn’t have to be ‘ladies’. They sew, gossip, laugh, cry, fight, curse, ask big questions, tell great stories and bond – like a fist! This is Louis LaRusso II’s last hurrah to his extended family of Hoboken women who were way ahead of their times. Louis LaRusso II loved these women - all of them - and The Flora Dora Girls Weekly Sewing Circle will provoke heart and soul as well as lots of laughter.

Louis LaRusso II, Hoboken’s theatrical chronicler, wrote about family and working-class life lovingly and humorously depicting the Hoboken experience in 26 plays including the Tony-nominated Lamppost Reunion, perhaps his best-known "Hoboken Play."

10 Big Questions

2008-09-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Seeking Answers to 10 Big Questions

from The Flora Dora Girls Weekly Sewing Circle by Louis LaRusso II

1. What is on your mind these days?

2. What is worth fighting for?

3. What are the most important relationships in your life?

4. What would you like to be able to forgive?

5. How would you like to look?

6. Are men worth it?

7. What are you reading?

8. Who has hurt you?

9. What do you always really, really like?

10. Who do you miss?

Experimental Philosophy and Joshua Knobe

2008-08-19T07:10:00.000-07:00

Joshua Knobe suggests in What is Experimental Philosophy that philosophical arguments are often structured on "claims about people's intuitions." These claims, although not measured empirically, become the foundation of general theories. Experimental philosophy tests these claims with empirical methods. As an artist, especially as an artist with a practice in performance and community arts, I wonder what is experimental art? Does experimental philosophy offer some insight into foundational art claims that can be reconsidered and methods to do so?

The first question Knobe asks is from Saul Kripke's story of the "man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic." The question is one of identity. If a man takes the credit for another's work, assigning his name to it, does the name then refer to the one that steals or to the one that did the work? The answer to this question varied depending on the part of the world it was asked. The difference in responses could be differences in valuing the work over ownership and individual fame. If the work is valued, the performer is linked to the action regardless of the mistaken name. If the name and fame is valued over the work, the one credited "owns" the work. The credit can be taken because the work is seen as product, something that can be exchanged for fame and power, not a process that cannot be separated from its performer and a process that empowers its performer and those understanding and continuing the work. The question Knobe asks is one of unethical ownership. The answers cause me to rethink creative production in a society based on ownership. How is ownership shaping and limiting our creative responses to global concerns?

The second question is one of intent. If one aims solely for one result, regardless of the known disregarded cost or benefit of other additional outcomes, does one receive the credit for the benefit and/ or the blame for the damage of the additional outcomes? As an artist concerned with my addition to human material over-production, the answer to this question is pertinent. The answers seem to reveal that when judging others we blame them for the bad results, while not giving them credit for good results. This seems the opposite of our self-judgment where we are eager to take credit for good results, and reluctant to take responsibility for the bad. Still more interesting is that negative results challenge us to "learn", change behavior, and grow while positive results inflate our egos and encourage less awareness and less caution in future actions. The trail of changes left in our wake, intentional and unintentional, still make the same difference. Perhaps the answers to this question suggest we should focus less on our goodness and more on these changes. Justifying our goodness may be just what is blinding us to witnessing what is happening.

The last question has to do with free will. In stories where the characters had absolutely no free will, are they still morally responsible? Most answered yes. In a time when the news media reveals moral failings hourly and art production is full of fantasies of freedom from moral restrain, why do we cling to our free will and its partner moral choice? Does free will somehow equate being? If we are predetermined do we exist? Do we fear free will without morality? If I do not question or create as an expression of free will in an undetermined exploration of the world, questions one and two do not matter. In my experience those things I can least question, are the questions that challenge my most defended positions, positions that have fallen out of sync with my experience. I am not willing to yield my belief in free will or my ability to attempt moral choices, but Knobe's questions show me my resistance and a need to ask why.

Newness Undefined for New York

2008-06-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

To Claudia LaRocco
NYC Futurism
Dear Claudia,
You evoke the memory of Futurism together with PERFOMA Director RoseLee Goldberg’s challenge to provoke the future. How should we greet “the confounds of logic”, the corruption of certainty, the monstrous mounds of information, the flatness of too much choice, the violent assault of unremitting, dulling images and incessant noise? The weighty debris of progress is isolating and immobilizing us.

New York is movement. New Yorkers don’t wait around for luck. New York is a city that loves work. We love to argue about who works the hardest. We kibitz about effort that beats the odds. Our future is in not fearing our industry. Yet, our work has become entangled with the production of too much stuff. We are bloated with over-consumption. We need less things and a new industry of connections.

Goldberg and Marinetti call us to continue to perform in the face of the unknown. To caress and revive what has been given up. Bricolage. To divorce words from sentences, work from things, actions from disciplines. To shed weary grammar that taps energy. To resist the signifier. To violate boundaries. To cross tongues. To reassemble. To scream so loudly, into the winds of change, that determined, rigid thought cracks, and pure sound pierces the heart with the kindness of unforeseen results.

Goldberg and Marinetti call us to be light, alert, engaged, to perform and to continue with eagerness and energy. Our action is what feeds the continuous renewal of the City.

2008-05-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

2008-05-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

2008-04-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

2008-04-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Virginia Woolf

Body

2008-04-15T21:21:00.003-07:00

Sometimes I want to escape my body. Not leave the world, but know it through a different door. Escape the limitations of having only one window on the world. It is not out of dislike of my body. It is out of knowing there are things I cannot know.

Body

2008-04-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

For, the body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another.

Simone DeBeauvior from The Second Sex

2008-04-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

People ask us what we are sewing. We are sewing the writings that have shaped us, marked us.

2008-04-09T21:39:00.000-07:00

Our Side of the Street

2008-04-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

On our side of the street are businesses, apartments, homes. On the other side is a gaping pit of demolition. A wound. There are plans for a new sports facility, housing, and a new improved neighborhood. This completely new neighborhood will not be for anyone that is part of the neighborhood now. The plans are for a new neighborhood with new neighbors, one that doesn’t even see that there is a community here being displaced. Even in the rain, people tend to avoid the covered sidewalk on the other side of the street. They prefer to walk on this side where they are seen. Part of being here, is seeing the people here. Being part of this street. Art is witnessing and acknowledging life.

" Battle of Brooklyn" is a documentary by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley about the efforts of local community activists to stop a massive development in the area before Dec 31, 2009. If you are interested in helping finish the film, the site is: http://www.kickstarter.com/

Trailer: http://www.rumur.com/battle

Donations can go to: MPI (Moving Pictures Institute), 375 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10013 with a subject line"Battle"

Here is related press:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/08/25/2009-08-25_atlantic_yards_saga_put_into_focus.html

http://netsarescorching.com/2009/10/13/nas-interview-battle-for-brooklyn-filmmaker/

http://fort-greene.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/the-day-get-informed-on-atlantic-yards/

http://www.brownsto ner.com/brownsto ner/archives/2009/07/battle_of_brook.php

Surprise

2008-04-09T20:47:00.000-07:00

Soapbox Gallery

You see what you want to see, until you are surprised. We have spent several days in this small window front gallery on Dean Street in Brooklyn and surprised many… others pass never noticing we are here. They don’t allow themselves to be surprised.

Work

2008-04-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

Work resists death. For the longest time the material result of work, the stuff we produce, obscured for me the importance of how the process of working influences our perception of time. It is with our tasks, even the completion of trifles, we strive to persuade time to give us some advantage over death. We squeeze in as much as possible into our days, hoping our work and plans will be valued enough to earn us more time, more life, or at least remembered longer. Death, however, is inevitable, time is indifferent, and memories short. And we know all this. Our stack of accomplishments doesn’t buy more time, yet doing them consoles us. Working brings rhythm, structure, meaning, connection, and purpose to the space between birth and death. Working does not extend life, yet by working, engaging, life is expanded, marked, lived.

2008-04-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Driving through Brooklyn with a chair, that still resembles a tree more than a chair roped down to the top of the car, I wonder why performing this installation matters. Yet, it does. As I place an embroidered piece of cloth, draping it just so, I experience the delight of, "YES, perfect." What is the source of this certain joy? Color, shape, actions, and symbols. Arranging time and space infuses life with energy, yet we understand so little of our need for this type of essential nourishment.

2008-04-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

Art flows like a river between people. All art is collaboration and community.

2008-04-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

When sewing, one draws the thread through the cloth. The cloth, itself made up of threads, is not a barrier, but the material that holds this additional layer. In this installation, like when sewing, one layer welcomes the next. Soapbox Gallery

2008-04-04T00:14:00.000-07:00

Marking/ Bodies/ Time Soapbox Gallery

March 28 to April 11, 2008

636 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York

Soapbox Gallery, Brooklyn March 28, 2008

2008-04-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today Juliana Cope and myself, Sherrard Bostwick, began a two week long artistic residency in the window of the Soapbox Gallery at 636 Dean Street in Brooklyn, New York. The residency is a continuation of a nearly year long Cope/ Bostwick artistic exchange and collaboration to explore drawing in the broadest sense... drawing as marks that form what we see and how we think.

In late spring 2007, we set some perimeters for collaborative drawing. Once set, guidelines were immediately challenged. As Adorno said, art tends to negate itself as it incessantly alters form. The hours spent setting expectations were undermined by creating the artworks. As we were exhausting our patience for talk, we built a foundation of trust in our experience. The experience central to our collaboration was allowing each other to finish our drawings.

For me this exchange as been a door outside of myself. My drawings when passed on to Juliana were extended, transformed, or completely altered into unrecognizable surprises. The drawings opened to another hand and delighted in the otherness.

There are two sides to the exchange. I had to draw into Juliana's work, too. The weight of how to respond to something I didn't understand or create, forced me to follow blind possibilities until they played out. Today as we installed MAKING/BODIES/ TIME, I watched us follow this fragile thread of trust and possibilities that continuously opens onto what is other and brings it in.