Here are rundowns on a couple of recent projects that have yet to be included in my body of work. I’ll start at the beginning:
First, The Frozen Section. This was a complex, you-had-to-be-there kind of project. It was heavily layered both formally and conceptually. It begins with the memory of my father’s battle with, and death from cancer. During his illness he went blind, couldn’t form sentences, and generally deteriorated.
In a metaphorical revisioning of that event, I blindfolded and gagged myself, and stayed in an unfamiliar apartment alone for a day. The event was documented on super-8 film.
The film was then presented along with the recording of a telephone conversation I had with my mother last spring about these events. I created a large loop with the film, running it around the space like caution tape at a crime scene. The loop ran through a projector that shone it on a screen. As viewers watched the scheduled showings of the film and audio, I used the heat from the lamp in the projector to burn holes in the film. The film became a reification of memory, and how it changes through time as it loops around the space of the mind, the burning of bits from it enacted a kind of mental deterioration, present in my father’s illness as well as the average retention of memory.
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The project that followed this was a performance work called Passing. Simple in its design, it involved taking a group of people outdoors and having a fire in a barrel to stand around for warmth and reflection. I shared stories from my childhood of people and things that are now dead, doing a kind of survey of personal experiences with death. As I did this, I passed around pictures of the things I talked about, subsequently burning the images and saving the ashes. Similar to the previous project, I engaged the photographic image as a metaphor for memory and its somewhat intangible nature, transforming the photgraphs as the stories transformed in space and time.
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Following the Passing project, there was a huge conversation about the spaces where art, and more importanly the kinds of questions art asks, can happen. The outdoor fire, as simple a gesture as it is, seems to have a lot of power behind it. So I decided to experiment with other kinds of spaces hold similar kinds of value, and was curiosu as to what would happen if I declared them as art projects. Enter the Dinner project:
The class I was in happened to fall on the Wednesday evening before the Thanksgiving holiday, and it seemed a fitting time to present the Dinner project. I was also completely relying on the fact that it was for a ‘class project’ to provide the art context part of it, much in the same way an artist like Rikrit Tiravanija relies on the gallery and his status as an artist to keep his events in the realm of art.
The act was conceptually simple, to make a Thanksgiving dinner for a group of fifteen people who were not family members, and to simply refer to it as an Art event (art with a capital “A” means it’s super-high art). There was alot of interesting conversation that occurred, but not much about art, even after I suggested we talk about the art project at hand. This was an interesting response, since the previous project seemed to spark alot of conversation about art. We’ll critique it more this Wednesday, but I’m starting to realize that there are some lines between “art” and “life” that are perhaps harder to blur than I thought.
I stuck with my mother’s recipes, still working with my own experiences as a starting point, and using them to create this space. Needless to say the food turned out surprisingly well, especially considering I’ve never made a Thanskgiving dinner before. Some say I have a knack for following instructions, but I’d like to think it was my creative, well-rounded mind and huge skillset that contributed to this fantastic event.
Below are the pictures.
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