Not quite 10 Things, Artist Project Edition, Part 1
The collective small things that make a whole
Of the various things artists make, I adore projects, the kind where someone plucks an idea out of their brain and feeds it over and over until it grows to become A Thing. I am especially enamored with projects that interact or correspond with someone (or many someones) else. Here are some examples.
In 2014/15, Ann Hamilton had an installation at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle called SENSE. It was my formal introduction to commonplace books — personal compendiums of knowledge — and viewers were invited to collect elements of the exhibit to create their own portfolios of information. In her documentation of the project, Hamilton wrote:
An exhibition is a form of exchange; like a conversation, it is organic, changed by each person who enters and whose acts of giving and taking will become the public life of the project.
An enormous part of the exhibit were tacked up salon-style images on newsprint in floor-to-ceiling displays of details like animal paws and underbellies, captured by scanning specimens from the Burke Museum. There were rows and rows of copies, in stacks on 2-hole document holders, of quotes, both typed and handwritten, as material to pull from. It was like walking through a curiosity cabinet of immense proportions and being allowed to fill your pockets with little pieces of pilfered treasures.
Upon leaving, viewers were given the opportunity for their image to become part of the exhibit collection, to replace the information taken from installation with something personal. You would stand behind a semi-transparent panel and allow your presence to be documented. The closer you stood to the panel, the more defined your portrait.
I’ve simplified the description of SENSE, left out rooms upon rooms in a comprehensive installation that represented a long period of dedication to this interactive vision. Here is Ann Hamilton’s booklet for the project in digital form so you can see it from her perspective. And many, many thanks to Suzanne Ragan Lentz for the invitation to visit the installation with her and for introducing me to the work of her favorite artist.
Every person who keeps a regular sketchbook and has a little library documenting creative inspiration and experiments is on my list of projects I adore. There’s this magical feeling I get when seeing an artist’s work on display and there are sketchbooks to flip through, and it’s possible that I spent more time immersed in those pages than experiencing the result they led to.
A’driane Nieves left her sketchbook at Very Small Fires in Los Angeles, accompanying her show Self-Evident Truths and the show would incomplete without it. It’s an extra layer for the viewer to develop a relationship with the art, and a generous one at that!
Last week I chatted with Brady Black outside his Seattle studio and never made it past the sketchbook from his time in Beirut in a little pile of sketchbooks titled Things I Saw Today. Here’s a peek inside one from Seattle.
When I visit a secondhand shop and see piles of old black-and-white photos and slides for sale, I’m at a loss for what to do with such ephemera. Thankfully not everyone shares my uncertainty.
One of Ben DiNino’s methods of collaging uses slides and negatives, as in those little squares of film. Besides the necessary patience for working in a tiny format, I like the added aspect of the projector or having to scan the collage to render it at a size convenient for the viewer.
But what do you do with a bunch of very small collages? The irresistible charm of a vintage slide box filled in the answer to this question for DiNino. If I say Kodak you can probably already guess the yellow of such a box. The artist translated the design to a larger version, a well-executed package containing a hand-bound book with 130 images of slide collages, 10 enlarged reproductions at 7x7-inches complete with slide mounts silkscreened by hand, and an LED light screen for viewing the enlargements. This is art you must handle to experience and it makes me wish more art was meant for such interaction.
The collage equivalent of the grass is greener over there is how attractive someone else’s stash of materials is compared to my own. When I use fodder sourced from collage friends, that relationship becomes part of the story embedded in the art. It’s a form of collaboration and community interaction that is reason 832 why I love collage people!
Erin McCluskey Wheeler’s long distance color collages incorporate materials from her network of fellow artists: cyanotypes, collections of painted papers, vintage photos, and more. The results are richly colorful, and if you imagine a studio with piles of paper organized by color, this reel from Wheeler’s Instagram won’t disappoint.
Collaborations between artists take many forms. I’m partial to the shared projects akin to pen pal relationships — a dialogue that takes its time with permission to meander.
Sabine Remy in Germany and Lynn Skordal in the US began collaborating over a decade ago. One of their projects involved a pair of identical books that each altered. I Love the Little Fishies, one of the altered books, was displayed then catalogued in University of South Dakota’s archive of work in their Bound and Unbound altered books exhibition. The other book, The Little Goldfish Pond, can be seen in this reel from Remy’s Instagram.
Speaking of pen pal sort of relationships, Adam Voith (Little Engines, among other things), recently shared that he shares a Google Doc with a correspondent in Sweden. It’s a casual, sort of random dialogue, likely filled with the routine oddities and observations we would share with someone seen regularly enough to not have to catch them up on our lives.
The thought of it brings to mind fika, an intentional pause in the Swedish day to connect with other humans and recharge. Sign. Me. Up.
This may not be an artist project per se but it represents the correspondent nature of creative people relating to each other. There’s a vision of the artist as a loner, protected from outside influences, characterizing creativity as a mythological individual genius. If an artist’s job is to reflect society back to itself, that’s only possible when in communication with other humans.
I have a lot to say about the mythology of the lone wolf artist but I’ll save it for another time.
Is there a collaborative artist project on your radar you would like to share? I’d love to know!
Excuse the typos and occasional awkward stumbles. Consider it an antidote to influencer culture and our over-optimized lives.
So wonderful and inspiring!