life and/in art

The implications of the Domestic Departures workshop will take me a little longer than one day to process, but as I just returned to New York from Santa Ana I really wanted to begin to post about my experience, what I learned from others, how my approach to art making has shifted, etc.

It was incredibly interesting to work with 19 other artists in Santa Ana (a location antithetical to New York City, with its strip malls and driving culture). At first I was claustrophic; although there was vast amounts of physical space, somehow I was not open to being around US mass culture in that way (clearly, New York City is also a city of US mass culture, but the mall culture somewhat threw me for a loop).

The focus of the workshop was the theme Domestic Departures. That was the thing in the middle for us to work with/around/in, etc. This was not about us as individual artists with our own betties making our own art, but rather being individuals making art as facilitated by Rosenclaire's, also to facilitate the public to start thinking about Domestic Departures.

At first it was very difficult to wrap my head around this. Collective art but not collective in nature, collaborative but not for the sake of collaborating, individual but making work about Domestic Departures. But as the days progressed, the work began to generate itself, all of us, the public.

After getting over myself, things really began to move, both personally and for the group. The work was made because of and inspired by everything and every one. It's hard to express at the moment, but not one piece could have been made independently; each piece was because we were all there together around the theme.

Hayley and I cleaned a horribly dirty vestibule until it gleened with lavender. With yellow and pink gloves, mops and scrub brushes, we cleansed the space. Before and during the open studios for the studio our studio was housed in. The handlebars sign can be transformed into "handlebras" for future projects...