I thought a good start might be to talk about the main project I’ve been doing, since May 2006. Our two year lease is up this May and we’ve decided not to renew, so as I’ve been thinking about it, I will be planning for the residency in the summer leading up to August, and planning to move, either going for something in Europe or moving to another city in the United States. So I will also be thinking of this summer, and the residency, as a way of synthesizing what I’ve been doing and figuring out where to go from there.
The Fort Grunt project was also a fairly intense collaboration that had some successes and some failures and I think could be good for everyone to think about, for how we want to do the folio in Belgium, and maybe more focus for this blog?
(that’s me on the right, ben on the left.)
After grad school I was in Venice, Italy for a year, teaching printmaking and getting some projects going but in general not too happy with my post-grad school work. I moved back to the states in October 2005 (after a month in Holland and a show in Berlin) with live with my fiance at the time, and I had several pending jobs- but the relationship and the internship/teaching positions all fizzled within a month of being back, and I was left with very little options. Ben and I had discussed doing a project together if we lived in the same city- and since I had no pending plans, I moved down here to Durham, NC and managed to find a studio. This took unexpectedly long, as Durham is a growing city that’s quickly turning out most of it’s warehouses and cigarette factories for lofts and upscale restaurants. Nicer to live in, sure, but not so easy to find cheap space to work in. So we did find a space in the newly formed Bull City Arts Collaborative, along with a letterpress printer, a video documentarian and a musician. The space is downtown, and our studio is in the front, with several large windows- this wasn’t something we planned on, but were happy to work with. We have turned the one large window into the Aquarium, where Marcus and Dustyn have shown work, and we’ve been open for the monthly art walks in Durham, and somewhat successful at selling work.
The location in a way influenced the work a lot more than I would have thought. The public location, and the number of random people who would come through, had us thinking of working on small, discrete objects that would be ready to hang and sold for reasonable amounts (between $10 and $60)… more about this in part two. Another, lesser factor, but a factor nonetheless, was being next to a local gallery, Branch, that is a really nice space and sometimes has good shows, but mostly has tasteful hipster-minimalism type work, which I think led us to move against that and make more crowded, rough/painterly work with garish colors. This may have in fact kept the sales low, but it felt way too easy to make the clean stuff..
The first 4 months or so (May to August 2006) was spent working up a random number of things, getting the name (chosen from a list of several hundred we came up with, for it’s military-ness and also for how dumb it sounded), and in general just working up a number of possible ideas. We settled on working with a series of characters and scenarios that drew on comics, biological creatures, invented characters and desolate scenes. We had two solo exhibitions early on, in November 2006 and February 2007, then there was a lull until this past winter- no solo shows but numerous group shows.
Things that worked really well were in the first year, working together figuring out how to build a body of work, getting sets of work to a finish, experimenting (the large 20 x 8 ft wall allowed for working on numerous pieces at once), and planning new projects. In the second part I’ll write more at length, but this arrangement didn’t last- something perhaps of more interest for this group.
So I think some of the positive things to take away from this project have been:
1. Working out a number of ways for conceptual and formal collaboration.
2. Having the opportunity to have a store-front studio, being able to bring in a wide variety of people into the space, get reactions, etc.
3. The freedom of having a finite body of work, that I can break from, mine for further projects, etc.
That’s all for now. Hope to get the next post up more quickly.
