& Exhibitions
For more information about the festival visit:
Thanks once again to all the folks who lent me a hand documenting the Art in Odd Places projects:
A collaboration between Nicholas Fraser and Heidi Neilson.
On October 25th, 2009, colored chalk texts were installed at nearly 40 locations on the south sidewalk of 14th street to indicate the location of natural features from 1609 as described on Heidi's Art in Odd Places map project Urban Forest on 14th Street.
Download the map at HeidiNeilson.com
From the press release announcing the launch:
The site aims to serve as a platform for an open dialogue about contemporary art in all forms and fashions. Through research and investigation into artists around the world, we hope to create a compelling collection of works that we think need to be seen."
See Mapping Project #6 here.
I recently installed a new series of ephemeral text installations in the block around the BronxArtSpace in the Mott Haven as part of Melissa A. Calderón's series of one night shows called CONVERSIONs. Thanks to Alex Guzman for his help during installation.
Check out their website for more info: http://www.conversionsnyc.com/
The Paterson Project is comprised of two distinct texts, interwoven directly on the floor of a defunct silk dying factory.
The first layer uses selections from interviews with Paterson workers recorded by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 1994. The second layer uses selections from William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson.
The worker selections combine straight forward recollections of factory processes, conflicts between labor and management and the day to day routines of factory life. Filled with subtle and witty psychological portraits of individuals and heartfelt laments over the changes in the industry as factories steadily close, these interviews describe a vivid portrait of a city and industry now largely lost.
WCW’s Paterson is a sprawling text described as both a “poetic monument to and personification of the city” and “an in-depth look at the process of modernization and its effects”. Williams described his goal as “speak(ing) for us in a language we can understand…We must know it as our own, we must be satisfied that it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a language like all languages, a symbol of communication.” The selected passages are a mix of self-reflective inner conversations from his struggle to make art ‘speak’ in a meaningful manner, meditations on memory, loss and the mutability of the written word at its point of inception.
Both sources are laid out in unfixed, powdered chalk and can only be closely examined/read by walking directly upon them. As a result, the texts will slowly blur into one another and become illegible. The viewer is given final discretion to exercise editorial powers.