"Without Recourse" My first 2 person, site specific exhibition!

...And none of us brought a real camera! So, please excuse these fuzzy pictures from my crappy phone camera. There will hopefully be professional pics soon!

My fellow Studio 550 resident, Kate Coppola, and I spent this past week building an unfired ceramic installation in the temporary 3S ArtSpace gallery in Portsmouth, NH. Not only was this an exciting event because it was our first 2-person show for both of us, but we only had 2.5 months to design and create the whole show! Kate already works unfired, but I decided that the only way to make this work is if I did the same. So for this show, I was working in a completely new and experimental format.We had originally planned/hoped to be finished by Thursday night (which is also what the gallery staff wanted) so that we could have Friday to rest, do finishing touches and get pretty. Well, if you look at this picture from 2 am Friday morning...I think you can see things did not go as planned! We both ran out of clay Thursday night...

Day 4/5. Woman Down.

...but in the end there were no major hang-ups and we finished at 4:00 pm Friday with time to dress and attend and hour of happiness before the opening. We arrived fashionably late to a pleasantly crowded gallery.
Here is our show statement: "Though our work might look quite different at first glance, if one reads our artist’s statements, they will find much overlap of concepts between our works. We focused on these similarities to form the building blocks for this collaboration. Even though Kaitlyn works with animal forms and Annie with tree forms, our work centers around a core of environmental degradation and seeks to elicit a paradoxical sense of threat and empathy from our viewers. We both utilize a large installation format because the work has a greater impact when it is on a human scale, projecting into the viewer’s space to confront them on a more visceral level and control how one moves through the space. We hope to challenge viewers' sense of claustrophobia and force them to engage with both the work and fellow viewers in a limited space.

These forms are meant to be devolving, becoming less natural and reflecting on their more twisted natures. The unfired nature of the clay forces the work into a state that is vulnerable, ephemeral, and deeply ingrained with the potential for change; which direction this change will take is the question. This scene is built up to the brink of collapse, perched precariously right before the moment of dissolution. At this moment on the brink, failure is a given without the intervention of our collective potential for empathy. This is where the core similarity between our work really comes into play: the absurdity of what it means to be flagrantly marching toward our own demise as if our actions have no consequences."

 Below are the cell phone images to give you a taste. I'll do a website update when we have professional shots. (If you are unfamiliar with our work: Annie: Trees. Kate: Creatures)

Front center-ish

Front left

Front left

Front right-ish

Front right

Back alcove

Back right corner

Back to front

In the alcove, looking out at our over worked installation assistants.

Tired!

The opening went well with over 50 attending which is good for a very cold night and the gallery being just outside of down town.  

If you're curious, my construction techniques involved heating up and bending PVC pipes, coating them with paper clay then paining black with tempera. The ceiling part is wire and stripped ivy vines. Here are a few studio/transport/install shots:

Used a spare studio to stage the pieces

Used a 17' moving truck to transport the work over 1 hour drive, snowed all day...I'm still fighting the remnants of a  very bad cold I caught on this day...8 days ago...UHAULS do NOT handle well in the snow!

Rather creepy in this truck...

Gallery shot, this may have been as late at Thursday morning!

There you have it! A very interesting process overall. Much easier to move than my other work, but took way longer to install. But I now have these components to use again in another space...maybe.

If you are in the area, HERE is the gallery info.

Lastly, I would like to thank:

Ben for all the encouragement, hours and hours of help and keeping the apt livable and the dog alive while I burrowed grad-school style into this. 

Kate for being so easy to work with and finding this opportunity and letting me join in!

Jeff also for your hours of help and food/coffee/supply runs.

3S Staff for giving us this opportunity, for being so excited and interested during the installation, and for trusting us with a crazy idea and never once making us feel rushed or insecure.

Monica for being flexible with our 550 schedules and letting us use the spare studios.

To my nanny family for being so supportive of my career and letting me switch around my schedule.

Yay!

Next big post will be my NEXT two person exhibition that I have been invited to participate in at the Soo Rye Gallery in Rye NH opening May 1! (But guess what, Rye is hardly 20 minutes from Portsmouth...so I can't use this same work.....better go to the studio....now!)