What I love most about Fargo, a list, not in any particular order:  the seasons, the Red River, Mickelson Park, the FM Community Bicycle Workshop,  the Asian and American Market, the Lotus Blossom, Nicole’s, Green Market, the Plains Museum, Renaissance Hall and the NDSU campus, Michael Strand and faculty, the Drawing Gym, Passage to India, my drawing seminar classmates, the billboard, leisure time, the Monkey Wenches Roller Derby, Frolfing, potlucks, all the wonderful people here.

It’s vast and often patterned like a quilt.  The clouds are very homogenous, with flat-bottoms and with a fluffy tops.  I love cloud watching and what happens when I stare up there– the phenomena of one’s sense of time melting away.

PLAY part 1 and 2 are positioned in spaces where people passing by are likely to be playing, or by association can imagine playful activities.  PLAY in Mickleson Park is positioned in a ball park where the act of playing is the architects’ intention.  PLAY on the swing set is positioned along the river near a pedestrian/bike path, a space where people are likely to be biking/walking/jogging, and the swing itself suggests a childhood image.  In other words, I’ve been seducing empathetic audiences with leading questions.

Michael brought up a quote a while back that I’ve been ruminating on internally:

“You are either supporting or subverting the existing power structures; there is no neutral.”

I recently posed the thought to my drawing seminar peers.  It made them uneasy.

With that, I decided to take my message to a more public space, one where I might nudge the trajectory of passers’ thoughts.  I’ve been doing recon on overpasses in the Fargo/Moorhead area.  Many of them are great locales for art, a public message, graffiti, etc but few of them are accessible without some serious safety gear.  One of my classmates suggested a pedestrian bridge that overlooks I-94, a major freeway through town and the great thoroughfare of the Midwest.  I visited the bridge to experience the space, get a sense for the foot and car traffic.

After experiencing the space, what struck me was that the bridge was pleasantly colored, like the sky.  Viewing it from the freeway below, the color makes the steel-concrete structure less domineering and distasteful.  The other notable observation was the gross volume of traffic that passes under at any given time.

A trip to Joann’s for some batting, felt, thread and needle, some expert advice from a practiced quilter, and I was set to start computing clouds.  I bought high-loft batting and doubled it up to make the letters fluffy and thick.  I sewed the double layers together to make on-site construction easier.

On Saturday, I installed PLAY- part 3.  It was cold and windy with a little sprinkle here and there.  I hadn’t anticipated how cold it was going to be but rather dreaded the thought of being above the freeway for hours.  I pushed the letters through the chain link to the other side, safety pinning it to the fence to prevent it from falling on the cars below (that was a little nerve-racking).  I proceeded to sew the batting to a felt backing on my side of the fence.  I liked the idea of sewing onto chain link over a freeway.  It was an interesting experience as sewing is usually a relaxing, in-home activity and well, standing on a freeway overpass is not.  After some deep breathing, my first letter on the fence, a few pedestrian visitors, lots of honking from below, and some extra layers courtesy of Michael, I started to relax and be in the moment.  Four hours later, the installation was complete.

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.–Jean Piaget

I went for a run (a rare occurrence as I rarely run on pavement anymore) a few weeks ago as a way to exercise and explore my surroundings.  I came across an old, rusty swing set frame on the side of the pedestrian/bike path near the river.  I couldn’t help but think of it as place to position work. I remembered my swing set in our yard growing up and how I always wondered if the whole thing would either tip over or if I would just wind around the frame if I swung too high.  Neither happened.  Perhaps I didn’t swing high enough.

The path is along the Red River and like most areas surround the river, it was under water a month ago.  It’s cut off to motor vehicles but sees quite a few bike commuters and pedestrians.  What I liked most about it is that you miss it if you’re not paying attention.  It’s rusted and surrounded by trees, brush and weeds.

The Frame

The approach

The backside

I decided on wood letters so I could paint them a noticeable, bright red color, my favorite color of my childhood.  I chose exterior house paint- lipstick red.

The first coat. It stuck to the paper, of course, and I had to sand it smooth. I'm such a rookie.

I put it up last week.  I haven’t had time to sit and observe the reception but I did take a few photos.

Every work must inhabit a space–a gallery, bookstore, barnyard, etc.  A work simply cannot exist outside a matrix of production and consumption, location and reception.  A cultural work that is self-reflexive about the specific conditions of its own production and incorporates those conditions of production and reception in the form of the work itself is what we will refer to as the “positioned” work. — Trevor Paglen & Aaron Gach

Isn’t all work positioned?

The parameters:  Consider location, surrounding environment, reception.  The act of drawing need not be the primary means, but you must use drawing at some stage of the project (initial working out of ideas, reflection, etc).  Keep in mind that in using drawing, you may define it as a noun (making drawings), or as a verb (using a process that reflects characteristics of drawing in some way).  Present documentation of your work in whatever form suits your purposes to convey the essence of your project and how it’s positioned.  You must position your work outside of a conventional art context.  Position it long enough to feel that you have achieved some kind of result, and are able to reflect on the success or failure of your project.  Consider the phenomenological experience.  How does your work’s positioning account for the experience of the sensing body (yours and others)?

In these next few projects, I literally play with the materials I use, the space the work inhabits, and the audience I seek to engage.

The position: For PLAY part 1, I explore Mickelson Park as a site of exhibition.  Mickelson is a park I’ve been frequenting to observe the crest and recession of the flood.  As the flood water recedes from the park, the baseball and softball diamonds have become smooth, muddy canvases, materials on which to make my mark.   The mud is perfect– soft, sticky, gooey, and stinky.   The contrast of the dark, muddy brown colored surface to the lighter, golden brown underneath is a welcome surprise.  Michael as my mentor, I borrow from him the idea of body as tool.

I chose the word, play, so I could form the word while performing the act, but also as an invitation to my audience to engage with the word 1) as they read it– what does it mean?  what’s your form of play?– and 2) later when they enact it, as a willful way of expressing oneself but also of the bodily experience of the act itself.

On deck

Yum!

2 days later, in the sun

1000 Marks- Drawing as Ritual

Goal:  Complete a drawing where all the marks are as similar as possible.  Design a specific gesture that can record a single mark.

Consider:  1) a gesture you feel comfortable repeating but challenges your ideas of how drawings should be made. 2) the materials used to make your mark.

Parameters: 1) the mark must be no larger than 3×3 inches, but can be as small as you wish. 2) Avoid image-making; instead focus on mark-making.  The act of making the drawing in this assignment is ultimately more important than the finished drawing.

My first thought was literally, what do I do that’s ritualistic? Well, I sleep, I breathe, I eat, I cook, I exercise, I pee/poop, I bathe, I groom. And then I stopped.  I bathe, I groom.  I recently had a conversation with my coworkers, each of us disclosing what obsessive compulsive habits we secretly harbor.  The only one I could come up with is my OCD-ness around hair in the bathroom.  I really loathe all the hair that accumulates in the bathroom, and especially in the shower drain.  I dislike hair in general, when it’s not attached to someone, and sometimes in large quantities when it’s attached as well.  I can’t pinpoint when my disdain for hair began but I think it was around puberty.  We don’t need to go into the psychology of this but it was about this time in my life when I started collecting my hair on the shower wall when I shampooed it, rather than pull it from the drain when it got clogged.  I’ve always thought of these daily collections as hair drawings.  In fact, my ex-girlfriend, Kat, used to call them my daily Miros.

What better mark than my hair?  It’s literally (I’m very literal) my mark–my DNA.

Hair is a funny thing.   What style we chose to wear it in, it’s length, whether or not we dye it, it’s part of our identity.  It symbolizes beauty, strength, health, age, vitality.  Unattached to us, it’s dead– evidence of our mortality.

Since my arrival to Fargo, I have been thinking about different ways of recording my time here.  I feel so fortunate to have this kind of time to myself.  It makes me realize how busy I’ve been with work and Ultimate.  It’s felt like a blessing.  How do I keep track of my time in Fargo?   This blog was my first idea.  Documenting my environment and activities with photographs and video has been another.

I decided this piece should reflect my time in Fargo so I transitioned my daily shower-hair ritual from shower-to-garbage to shower-to-envelope.  I began collecting my hair in for each day.

The next step in the process, how to adhere my hair and to what?  Canvas was my first choice as it’s a natural fiber, with a sturdy feel to it.  With Michael’s access to the painting studios at NDSU, I was able to acquire scrap canvas discarded by students after stretching their canvas to frames.  I chose a long 6-foot by 1 foot piece.  After testing some gesso and gel medium, I decided to get some matte gel medium–something transparent but not glossy.  I wanted the hair to have a clean, natural look on the backdrop of the canvas.

When I reached 1000 hairs collected slash when the assignment came due, (coincidentally they coincided) I made a time line of hair from March 10th to March 31st.  Each day’s hair varied in number, lengths, color (I lost a few gray ones) but assembled together, they look like an abstract horizontal line.

I put it up in our apartment.  It’s not the most aesthetically beautiful thing I’ve ever seen by a long shot–it’s still dead hair on canvas, I still don’t care for hair not attached to a body, and I’m still new to art making– but it’s my mark and my record of time.

I’m still collecting my hair in envelopes.  It’s hard to part with rituals.  I may have to keep up my new calendar.

Only March 19

Only March 3o

I’ve managed to make it out to the river (1/2 mile away) every other day now to document the water levels and to collect samples.  The water level has dropped by 5-6 feet since it crested, judging by my unprofessional eye.  A few roads are still closed, the parks along the river are still under water.  Here are a few photos for comparison sake and a few of my art project.  I wish the photos were of better quality but it’s what I got right now.  Click on the photos to get a better look.

Stop March 19

Stop March 30

Free Parking, March 25

Free Parking, March 30

Emerging Stop, March 28

Emerging Stop, March 30

Water from Fargo, March 25

March 26

March 26

March 26

Water from Fargo, March 30

Water from Fargo, March 30

Water from Fargo, March 30

Post Office rejected my card because I wrote the address "the wrong way," however, they managed to run it through the machine just fine. What's the point of this rule?