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BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)

Over three days this week, we got a lot done. And, as I write this, stuff is still getting done. This is why collaboration is such a valuable model for art practice.

But, it’s not just about getting stuff done, it’s the challenges, the insights, the novel perspectives that can be brought up around a table that push the work forward. With some of us having worked together for nearly three years, we can anticipate one another and move ideas and projects that much further along because there’s a context, there’s a history, there’s a resonating understanding of what we can do together.

Collaboration FTW.

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Pablo Valbuena’s Quadratura

Quadratura is a new site-specific light installation by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena. He projected a perspective grid between two rows of columns and onto the wall behind them, thus creating the illusion of an infinite pathway. Pablo reminds us that “Quadratura was the technique used in the baroque to extended architecture through trompe l’oeil and perspective constructions generated with paint or sculpture.” I suggest watching the short video of the installation setup included on his project page as it highlights the degree to which light transforms this space.

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Double Happiness

Here is a magnificent use of billboard space created by architect Didier Faustino. He has titled the work/installation/swing-set Double Happiness for pretty obvious reasons. Clever ideas like this usually don’t come from passivity towards the city, but an engaged, analytical, and curious attitude. I found this summary of the conceptual framework behind the project:

“Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.”

Via: Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas

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Power House Walking Tour: Understanding the Incremental

On Saturday, Eric, Danielle, and her sister, Jessica, and I headed over to the Power House neighbourhood walk in Detroit.

I’d been hoping to finally see this project in person, as it’s been a little over two years since I first wrote about it here. I’d missed their residency at the DIA (saw the installation, but didn’t get to see Mitch or Gina) and also missed them at MOCAD (but seeing their Neighborhood Machine on exhibition was very cool). So, to be able to get a tour and talk to Mitch about their project was really, really great.

Above, a to-do list from artist-in-residence, Monica Canilao, who plan to return to purchase the upper-half of this duplex.

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The Words Don’t Fit the Picture

The Words Don’t Fit the Picture is Ron Terada’s new text-based installation made in response to and sitting in front of the Vancouver Central Library. This illuminated sign stands on metal beams in front of the library’s front doors and can be seen from very far away. It is also a great example of how to securely mount large text in a public space, something we have been researching lately as a group.

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Janine Marchessault & the Leona Drive Project

Photo by wyliepoon.

A couple months ago I attended a talk hosted by Janine Marchessault on the Leona Drive project, which is a collaboration between The Public Access Collective and L.O.T. : Experiments in Urban Research (Collective).

Justin mentioned the Leona Drive Project back in 2009, but for a refresher: The Leona Drive project commissioned artist projects for a site specific exhibition in a series of six vacant bungalows slated for demolition by HYATT HOMES, a developer in Willowdale, Ontario (in the Yonge and Finch area of the GTA). The artists worked with a variety of media: audio, cell phones with GPS, architectural installation, projection, photography, sculpture and performance for a period of two weeks in the fall of 2009.

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Rivane Neuenschwander: I Wish Your Wish

From the Artforum review of Rivane Neuenschwander’s mid-career survey, including Eu desejo o seu desejo (I Wish Your Wish) by Michael Wilson:

I WISH LIFE WAS EASY; I WISH FOR INNER PEACE; I WISH FOR A HOLIDAY ON THE BEACH. The last of these pleas–all samplings from Rivane Neuenschwander’s participatory installation Eu desejo o seu desejo (I Wish Your Wish)–seemed not only the most achievable ambition but also the most timely, as guests arriving late to the Brazilian artist’s Tuesday night opening at the New Museum looked distinctly soggy after a summer storm. The mottos were printed on ribbons arranged around the walls of the lobby, and viewers were invited to take and wear one in exchange for suggestions of their own.

From an interview on ArtBlog with New Museum’s Curatorial Associate Benjamin Godsill, “Ribbons printed with wishes from visitors at previous exhibitions hang on the wall.  You take the ribbon, tie it on your wrist, and then replace it with a wish of your own.  The wish comes true when the ribbon wears off your wrist.  So by participating in this you are helping someone else’s wish to come true.” From the NYTimes review, “It’s modeled on a tradition from the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Bahia, Brazil: worshipers tie brightly colored silk ribbons to their wrists and wear them until they fall off, at which point their wishes are granted.”

Vaguely reminds me of the I Wish This Was project that Josh talked about a little while ago, though I enjoy that these wishes expand beyond the immediacy of the space (but it would be interesting to see this installed somewhere on an exterior wall). I saw the coverage for this show over the summer and really wished I had been able to see it… conceptualism, reciprocal art, participatory exchange, etc. A simple idea with an explosion of scale, it’s something we might keep in mind.

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Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’

Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006

Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects fading into the landscape. -via PSFK.com

The public art works of Ceyetano Ferrer are quite stunning on first glance. The optical illusion he creates seems at first impossible and mysterious, though the process is as “simple” as placing a well-planned sticker on to a surface. As far as “street art” goes, this very much falls in line with the guerilla style shock and awe that makes the genre so exciting and valuable in a certain sense of subversiveness.

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