Last weekend we had the writing collaboration of the 1W3KND Residency with Penelope Smart and Erin MacMillan. The result was two pieces of writing: one was essay style and the other was interview style. They stayed the weekend at Civic Space, brainstorming, eating, exploring, and of course writing.
The end result.
The 1W3KND Residency continues this weekend with Megan Marin and Irene Chin.
More soon.
Arrived at the space and found in the mailbox a copy of DIGBY VOL 1, courtesy of Sean Fox! The zine archives a series of shows at Digby House over the last year or so.
Is this the beginning of a zine archive?! Loved the envelope too.
Rosina has been hosting zine nights every other Wednesday since the summer at CIVIC SPACE, and I can’t wait to get caught up on what they’re producing. In the meantime, thanks to Sean for sending copy #64 to us!
From Paul as an update to this project:
It’s coming along well, now it records the file, generates the link and creates the contents of the tweet. Next step is rigging up the uploading and actual posting of the tweet.
Danielle and I went to Philadelphia to catch up with Mural Arts as we begin to work through some potential project ideas. It was a quick couple of days running around Philadelphia with our awesome host, Todd Bressi (above), looking at other Mural Arts projects and getting to meet a lot of incredibly great staff, artists, and community members. We also gave a public presentation that was followed by a lot of really, really great conversation (thanks to Phillyworks for co-hosting this!), and helped us to think through the basic elements of this project a bit further.
This post isn’t really meant to be an articulation of the project or even an entirely complete record of what we saw and did, but rather a reference point for ourselves as we continue to move project ideas forward. Above, a Mural Arts project along Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia.
To put it simply, we’re proposing a new artist residency project that connects with the amazing people at PEC (People’s Emergency Center), a Community Development Corporation that has worked in the neighbourhood for 40 years. That’s the broadest description anyways. The photos throughout this post are just visual references for us as we continue to work things out, so apologies for the brevity in context and captions. Above, one of the potential sites we may get to work in.
Nearby intersection.
Series of storefronts.
Nearby blank wall.
Gates.
Construction around beautiful and epic architecture.
Detail of storefront facade.
View of potential site.
Neon window sign.
Nearby Mural.
Neighbourhood architecture.
Exterminator’s sign.
Favourite building in the neighbourhood. PEC has already done some projects out of the middle section, which I think used to be a theatre, focused on community planning – Make Your Mark.
Detail of Make Your Mark open house door ad.
Most favourite advertisement.
More love. PEC offered artists storefronts over the past year to create window exhibitions.
Detail of one of those installations.
Remnants of commercial activity.
Liked this picket fence.
Architectural details.
Chalkboard paint applied to recycling containers.
Art installation.
Iron gate between apartments.
Window art installation.
Old Real Estate office, I think.
PEC’s new construction (in-fill on left) alongside older area homes.
Potential storefront site.
One of our favourite works we saw over the two quick days was Philly Painting, taking place in Germantown.
Neighbourhood artists (Felix ‘Flex’ St Fort (lead painter), Lateef ‘TT’ Rawls (painter), Anthony ‘Milk’ Fields (painter), Reggie ‘Butta’ Johnson (painter), and Taqiuddin ‘Muhammed’ Custis (handyman) were finishing up one of the last buildings to be painted — the project itself was initiated by Haas&Hahn via Mural Arts.
“Philly Painting is a neighborhood beautification project of unprecedented scale, set in North Philadelphia, around the Germantown and Lehigh Avenues. The goal is to mobilize the community to completely transform the commercial corridor and bring a new look to their neighborhood: A social and artistic experiment of urban acupuncture, beautification, and economic stimulus of unprecedented scale.” (source)
There’s also a great series of web shorts documenting the project.
We loved seeing this project in person — it really helped us in understanding the scale of the work. It’s also a great view of the types of projects Mural Arts is engaging that expands the scope and scale of murals.
On Tuesday, we went back to Lancaster Avenue for a tour inside one of the buildings that could potentially host the residency project.
Industrial Kitchen in storefront.
Old laundry room.
Stairway between storefronts.
Second storefront.
Backroom of second storefront.
Looking towards the windows facing the street of second storefront.
Small courtyard area behind the second storefront.
PEC staff and Danielle take a look at the outdoor space.
These buildings used to house a mental health facility.
Most rooms have incredibly great light.
But there are a lot of partitions that would need to come down.
There are two floors of small rooms.
Smaller room.
Room with closet.
Smaller room, window braces.
Small room.
Small room, radiator cover.
Bars on windows.
Larger room. It was great to get this tour and start to imagine how the space could be transformed. We’re still in the very early stages of planning and proposing this project, but walking through the buildings was hugely helpful. Thanks to PEC for making that happen.
The day winds down and we wrap up the tour along Lancaster Avenue, snapping a quick shot of a nearby sewer cover.
We’ll discuss this project more as it begins to move forward, but for now, we’re super excited and incredibly happy to have been able to visit Mural Arts, PEC, and some of the areas we might be working in down the road. Can’t wait to visit again!
We’ll be visiting Philadelphia to explore the development of short- and long-term projects in collaboration with the Mural Arts Program and community organizations in the city. During our visit, Mural Arts and Philly Works will be hosting a public presentation of our work, and a stimulating conversation about how artists can engage people in conversations and collaborative actions that build stronger awareness of, connection to and investment in our community fabric.
The details, if you’re in the area:
Monday, November 19, 6 p.m.
City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center
at the Thomas Eakins House
1727-1729 Mt. Vernon Street
Presented in collaboration with Philly Works.
We’ve played with Ponoko before, laser cutting some acrylic for a mould, and the results were great. We’re now sending off another couple of files for an upcoming project.
We’ll be cutting on mirrored acrylic .. and
… aluminum.
Ordered and locked! Should arrived in a few weeks.
1W3KND starts on November 16 and we’re incredibly excited to announce the list of selected participants that we’ll be hosting at CIVIC SPACE. But first, some background on the project.
1W3KND is aimed at developing essays, interviews, manifestos, critiques, reviews, and other texts around ideas of collaboration, socially engaged works, artist-run culture, and public practices. We’re hoping to publish these in one form or another some time next year. There have been a number of books released over the past year discussing socially-engaged practices (here’s a list of a few of our favourites), but we’re really interested in reading more from artists themselves, especially those in the earlier stages of their career. We think there’s a need to make more time to write through the ideas, questions, and concerns that come through engaging in these kinds of practices, and we’re hoping we can help to accommodate those interested in doing that writing.
The structure of the residency will attempt to focus and frame the writing by way of an envelope on the table with a list of instructions, including a brief overview of subject that the paired writers in residence will be spending the weekend exploring, discussing and of course writing about.
And now, here’s the list / calendar. If you want to connect with anyone, let us know!
November:
Penelope Smart
Erin MacMillan
Irene Chin
Megan Marin
December:
Jason Deary
Mary Tremonte
Zoe Chan
Sarah Febbraro
Mike DiRisio
Nathan Stevens
January:
Amber Ginsburg
Siobhan Rigg
VSVSVS
Julian Majewski
Jacqui Artnfield
Emily DiCarlo
February:
Nathan Swartzendruber
Mike Fleisch
Allison Rowe
Rhiannon Vogl
Photo courtesy of Chris Flanagan
We have the pleasure of hosting Chris Flanagan for a quick one-week residency here at CIVIC SPACE. He’s in and out, but if you’re interested in music in Windsor (and/or Detroit), I’m sure he’d love to talk to you …
Installation/sound artist Chris Flanagan is researching and experimenting with music related to Windsor’s musical heritage. Intrigued by the city’s proximity to the pop music heavyweight Detroit, Flanagan is exploring musical history and culture through Windsor’s discarded vinyl and cassettes.
For more information about Chris and his recent projects go to www.chrisflanaganart.blogspot.
Updates from Paul, as he works on the Max Patch for our window installation project, currently in R&D phase.
This is an image of the main patch in its larval form. Generates a filename with a time and date stamp and records audio to it with adjustable amplification. Next step is to make it upload the file, generate the tweet and then post the tweet. Then cleanup and putting a nice presentation face on it:)
Just put this subpatch together. It will be the patch that generates the filename for the audio to be uploaded. I’m going to feed the audio through a filter subpatch(right now it’s just a straight feed through), then use sfrecord~ to write it to a file on the disk using the filename generated by this subpatch.
Our rate of posting on here has slowed down considerably since the summer. We’re still busy, it’s just the pace of the work and projects now seems to span longer and longer time frames, and with so many ongoing and overlapping projects, it’s just a lot more challenging to find the time to keep track of it all. We’re actually putting in more time than ever, with Hiba and I meeting regularly two to three days a week and our colleagues joining in when schedules allow. It’s amazingly fun and productive, but harder than ever to document meaningfully.
So, just for a quick look into the last four or five weeks, here’s what we’ve been up to…
Above, we’re planning for the 1W3KND Writing Residency, and we’ll be announcing our participating writers and artists really soon.
We’ve also been hosting biweekly events at CIVIC SPACE. Every other Monday is All Tomorrow’s Problems. We take a lot of notes.
Every other Wednesdays are Zine Nights, and then there’s Skills For Good(s) on a semi-regular Tuesday night schedule. All of these events are free and open to everyone. We usually post the details on the right-hand side column of the front page of our website, and also try to keep civicspace.info up to date. Emphasis on try.
Here are some of the leftovers from Alana Bartol’s recent Skills for Good(s) on Making a Ghillie Suit!
October also allowed us to play host to Sam Lefort returning to take on a project with students from Forster.
The project and exhibition were so great and it was incredibly fun to have Sam back for an entire month.
Here’s just a little peek at her installation.
And, the process of taking down the vinyl to make way for the upcoming Cross-Plotting, opening on Friday, November 9th!
Hiba and I have been working on some other parallel projects for an exhibition in January. Think planes and banners.
Rosina provided the new over-sized pad of paper. It’s been very helpful.
We also still have some postcards left from Sam’s show, if you’d like some.
We’ve been patching the walls, a lot. I think the winter break is going to be set aside for a painting party.
We’ve also had the pleasure of Laura Gentili as a kick-ass studio assistant. She’s assembled furniture, changed door locks, organized, scanned, and sketched her way through the last few weeks, and been awesome the entire way.
Sam was kind enough to leave our space a little nicer than she found it. Above, and installation to brighten up the back office area at CIVIC SPACE.
Also, we’re still working on our window installation, with the help of Paul Anderson. Earlier today, he was testing a contact mic, while also going over details to build the Max patch we’ll actually need.
And this afternoon, Hiba and I also picked up a project that appeared in How to Forget the Border Completely.
This is something that Danielle has been wanting to do forever. Above, a really early prototype.
We’ll eventually laser cut and etch these from aluminum. Installation to follow. Also, in the background, we’re writing. We’re still working on the Homework publication with Brennan and Cholé. And, we’re planning projects into the fall of 2013. It’s good.