we will make it what it will be
February artist-in-residence Layne Garrett will facilitate a 'sculpture-raising'. Think good old-fashioned barn-raising, but less practical. Bring drills, bring food to share if you like, bring friends and family. We'll be outside mostly, so dress for the weather.
Garrett's playable room installation will also be open upstairs all afternoon, fun for the kids. In addition, he will give a brief artist talk/discussion; facilitate a Pauline Oliveros-inspired 'deep listening' activity, and convene a group of improvisers for a performance. Donations for Rhizome appreciated.
2 - 5pm: building project / open gallery
5pm: artist talk / discussion
530pm: group sound/sensory meditation
6pm: performance
Some background...............
Some themes of my residency have been:
collectivity, as manifested in several smaller building projects with different groups of kids, and then this bigger 'sculpture-raising' project
improvisation - weekly group sessions open to the community, in addition to daily personal explorations
value - what is actually valuable? what are our material assets? how might we begin to look at things with different ways of assessing their value, perhaps out of impending necessity?
err... I've been thinking a lot about this hyper-individuated society that runs us all ragged and that is currently teetering on the brink. How to be an artist right now? How to be a person? Right now the vast majority of us out of necessity have most of our needs met by a globalized system that from my perspective is consuming us all even as it ekes out its dying breaths. An alternative could be to build small resilient networks of dependency based on personal trust, but how do we even think about starting to do something like that? These projects are tiny stabs in that direction, an effort to facilitate different kinds of interactions in which the individual is not the raison d'etre, the be-all-and-the-end-all, etc. Experimental sound-based activist sociology? Try it, it's a very lucrative field...