The Ranch & the Lost Restaurant

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As a Frontier Fellow at Epicenter in Green River, UT I became obsessed with an abandoned ranch house kitchen, a lost restaurant and a memorable molasses cookie. You can read more here.

Perpetual Piñata Parlour

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Perpetual Piñata Parlour, with Flux Factory, was a four-day carnival about bureaucracy, capitalism, and language barriers that was presented in St. Petersburg, Russia for Art Prospect Festival. Visitors to the festival were guided by miming facilitators through a series of lost-in-translation American and Russian folk games, accumulating points of unclear value before participating in a collective piñata-breaking ceremony. This project commissioned by CEC ArtsLink.

Kitchens & Capitalism

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Kitchens & Capitalism examined the way different types of kitchens resist and/or replicate capitalism. The exhibit collected drawings of different kinds of kitchens: historical, home, collective, and industrial. Performances & conversations examined ways of performing the kitchen and how these shape our worldview. The exhibit opened with a time-traveling pancake potluck. Pancakes were made with einkorn, one of the earliest cultivated grains; Kernza, a perennial grain currently under development at The Land Institute in Kansas; and Corn flour, a contemporary staple grain. As part of our research I am mapping and remodelling Flux Factory’s collective kitchen.

This project funded by Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

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Hospitality Machines

A guided meditation inspired by the writing of Levinas, Habermas, and Anne Dufourmantelle. The meditation is a paired experience, two people staring into each others’ eyes, physically and philosophically confronting the other. For the gallery a small shelter with a bench places visitors knee to knee with their mediation partner. Live performances vary based on site.

Dol Corwenna

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A climate change and biosecurity garden that connects the town center with a new railway platform. Planted species are selected for their resistance to predicted conditions, and threatened features of the field are highlighted with landscaping and signage. When mature, the garden will consist of a wildflower meadow, a small orchard, a tree-lined path, and a raised flower bed. The garden design adopts local visual vernacular, so while it explicitly warns of local effects of global issues it is camouflaged within the expected view from a countryside train platform. This approach allows the project to co-opt the landscape surrounding Dol Corwenna through visual association: after visiting the field you might see the Welsh landscape itself as an evolving indicator of global conditions.

Corwen Field Stwdio

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Camp Little Hope returned to Corwen to launch the Corwen Field Stwdio. The Corwen Field Stwdio explored how an arts-led awareness of the local environment - built, natural, and cultural - can shape community-conscious regeneration efforts. Events, workshops, and exhibitions took place at 15 Bridge Street (the Old Spar), The Field Beside the Car Park, and around Corwen. The Stwdio worked with local groups, residents, artists, and schoolchildren to explore roles art and The Field could play in Corwen. Corwen Field Stwdio investigated models for a future residency program and demonstrated how an art project can be a community collaboration that helps shape the development of Corwen. Corwen Field Stwdio Website

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Camp Little Hope was commissioned by the Corwen Partnership, the Arts Council of Wales, and Addo, to imagine creative uses for a field that separates Corwen’s Town Square from the future platform of the Llangollen Railway. We developed three long term strategies for the field and town: Gardd Ceridwen (a platform for exploring biosecurity), the Toiledau Residency, and the Wayfinding project. We explored specific aspects of each strategy through art interventions.

Bibotorium

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The Bibotorium was an educational saloon and public think-tank. Camp Little Hope explored the future of water in Philadelphia through conversations with our visitors: tourists, neighbors, students, amateurs and experts. During the Hidden City Festival we worked on site, designing solutions to various issues affecting Philadelphia’s water and building boats to reference the implications of future water environments. By creating a space that is both social and scientific, we encouraged radical and imaginative conversations to address serious problems.

One Minute Film Festival: 10 Years

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The One Minute Film Festival took place annually in a barn outside of a small town in upstate New York, on the first Saturday after the 4th of July, from 2003-2012. Organized and hosted by artists Jason Simon and Moyra Davey, the festival samples a decade through the participation of hundreds of makers: ten years spanning the extremes of George Bush and Barack Obama, of You Tube and the near ubiquity of video within cultural institutions.

Construct Decay

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A series of experiments investigating the role of automation and reproduction. Sculptural components were hand-manufactured, made in great enough multiples to pique curiosity as to their purpose. Video was also used to further extend the quantity of the hand-manufactured. Other videos used automation, like Photoshop CS5s content-aware fill, to generate entirely new work through the accretion of minor changes.

Picket Wheel

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The Picket Wheel was a conversational catalyst and urban/rural intervention activating dialogues about private property, landscape, the gaze, and the commons. Rolling the Picket Wheel down the street opened conversations with pedestrians, cyclists, and almost as often drivers who would pull over to investigate

Blue Nile

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Blue Nile Ethiopian Cuisine occupies two levels of a former hotel in downtown Harrisonburg. An Ethiopian restaurant & bar upstairs with a bar & music venue in the basement. The original Blue Nile brought Ethiopian Cuisine to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Moving to a larger location and opening a music venue the Blue Nile played an important role in Harrisonburg’s downtown revitalization.

The Public Table

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The Public Table, with spurse, was a provisional free restaurant traveling from New Haven, CT to Bellows Falls, VT and ending in Cambridge, MA. The materials, both for the installations and meals, were gleaned. The number of dishes, size of the dishes, number of ingredients, type of ingredients and amounts of each were determined by an algorithm driven by a walk taken earlier in the day. The interiors of each restaurant were driven by the available materials in the different location