New Prints From this Spring

It has been a long time since I've posted any artwork...or much of anything. Ive continued on in this series of Contested Space embossings. The first included here is the Missouri River which is contested on not only water rights, damming, flow, and native lands, it also divides the Dakota's geographically into East and West river. In each state, the river divides its culture and its topography.

The second print also portrays a contested space...that of Mount Rushmore. The site is sacred not only to good patriotic American's, it is also a sacred site to the Native Americans. A few years ago, when I started thinking about sacred space, Mount Rushmore was foremost in my mind. I had never thought about it as a Native sacred space. But what happens when a colonialist people literally reshape a holy mountain in homage to their rule and build a tourist attraction upon a sacred site? It becomes a contested site.

This print took several tries to get it where it is today. The first with simple red thread conveyed the contested nature, but in the end seemed simply too anti-American. In the second, I added beading to connote the Native role in the contest over this place. Here I ran the beading along the heads to highlight the aspect of the landscape itself but at the expense of highlighting the contest. The third option, the one Ive ended with returns to the X's but with beading. Not only do the X's symbolize the contest over place, they also draw more closely from Native artwork where the 4 directional colors (as I have used) are placed in a vertical and horizontal axis. I simply have turned it on its side to make the X.

While I've not completed all the prints in this series, I expect it to be editioned in 5.

More prints and photos to come shortly from this semester.

Causing Trouble in New Jersey

Earlier this year I entered the members show at the Print Council of New Jersey, a wonderful group of artists and programs for printmakers. I entered a show and was accepted last year and so I thought I would join them this year. My piece Contesting Cyprus was chosen for their annual show entitled "Where have we been" or something along those lines.

The other day I received an email from the director saying that one of the venues for the show had deemed my work as "inappropriate," had been removed, and I was expected to make arrangements to come pick up the work. The County of Somerset Cultural & Heritage Commission sent us both letters notifying us of their decision. Hers got their faster since PCNJ is 10 minutes down the road while the time to get the letter to North Dakota took a little longer.

Ive attached a picture of the letter. I've gone back and forth with my emotions between thinking its funny and then being angry, and yet understanding. I don't deny that the piece is controversial. Its meant to be. I understand that the piece taken literally might be offensive...hey its got the F bomb in it. I understand that it might not be appropriate for all venues. I get that. But its what the letter insinuates about me and what that suggests about their utter failure to understand the piece that makes me angry.

"The [SCCHC] will not permit the C&H Gallery to participate as a platform for individual's political protests, promote hate speech or allow the display of obscenities. Your artwork has been removed as inappropriate for this venue."

It is the misguided assumption that these are my particular views rather than my effort to document graffiti as a sign of the many political, religious, and ideological contests marked upon place.

Along with the entry, I was asked to write a small statement on the work. This is what accompanied this particular print.

"The print takes two urban landscape images; first, of the Turkish North and one of the Greek South and placed them next to each other as in a diptych. I then used Photoshop to cut and paste the copious amounts of graffiti that covered most city blocks in both the North and South. The graffiti represents literal plurality of contests marked upon the landscape."

Now, I dont know if this statement was hung with the work or not. If it did not accompany the work, it makes their decision perhaps less offensive to me. Perhaps my current location within the safety of a university has heightened my idealism and I've forgotten to think about the impact that the literal words and statements might have upon and individual or community.

Oh well...Im still putting it on my C.V.

New Prints

Before I left for Seattle I had a bit of time so I pounded out 2 new prints and a mixed print from previously printed materials.

The first two continue on in the series of contested spaces. The first if Korea with the DMZ embroidered into the paper in a light blue to signify the division and presence of the United Nations. The second, decidedly more local for me are the Dakotas with the Missouri river embroidered in the same light blue. The river is a source of division on 2 levels. In one sense it divides both states into East and West territories. The divide is more than just geography or topography, it is cultural as well. The East side of both states hold most of the two states universities, industry, and population. The rivers are also hotly contested spaces over dams and water flow controlled by the Army Corp of Engineers.

The 3rd print is a new combination of old elements. I made them from the left over Twinkies from the fall and added the embossed flag. Its just a fun combination of imagery.

Rich 2 Visit to UND

This week has been a busy for the department of Art & Design who has played host to a visiting artist from Norway, as well as a beloved U.N.D. alum, Rich Patterson.  Rich earned a Master of Science in Early Childhood Education from The Graduate School at University of North Dakota in 2008.  Rich is also known as Rich 2; a well known graffiti artist in the 1980’s from New York City.  While his life has changed drastically from those days to teaching today in North Carolina, Rich has gifted the university community with several wall-sized works of his former handiwork.  For many years Rich had left the graffiti world behind him, but recently, in certain contexts, Rich is using his artistic gifts as a platform for his story and education.

Rich returned to campus to a full schedule including lectures in the department of Integrated Studies with Tami Carmichal, and for the Outsider Art class within the art department, in addition to creating a 8’ x 10’ foot work on canvas for the Integrated Studies Program.

Earlier this fall, just prior to school starting Rich's work was at the center of a small controversy.  As the school attempted to renovate OKelly hall, one of Rich's works was threatened.  Those who follow AoA might just remember a posting and nice following discussion back in August.  As Rich is a proud UND alum, the provost Paul LeBel (bottom photo Paul and President Kelly) and his wife stepped in and commissioned another piece for the school (see below).

Contested Spaces: UND's OKelly Hall and its Graffiti

Today I heard some disappointing news that Dean Martha Potvin recently discovered this wall commissioned by the Integrated Studies Program (ISP) of a UND graduate and well-known 80's graffiti artist from NYC. Her reaction is to paint over it because it apparently is not fitting to an academic institution. This is the 3rd or 4th of such pieces the artist (I cannot think of his name right now...I think its Rich something.) has done for the deparment. The painters are working down the hall and as I snapped a few photos of this street art, the one quipped, "We're gonna paint that."  This event only secures in my mind that graffiti is a potent form of protest and art.  This small hallway is now an ideological and aesthetically contested space. 

 The ISP department is a creative educational process that flourishes in the face of traditional academic isolation.  This creative work appropriately marks the space of this non-conventional program.  A simple text panel could be added to the hallway to help educate passersby on the gamut of what is currently considered art and highlight, rather than alienate, the creative work and inspirational story of an alumnus.

Cyprus Buffer Zone

I had meant to post this video some time ago, but now is a fine time as well. It comes from a group at Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. It gives a great overview the sense of contestation over Cyprus and the great divide among its people.

Cypriot Anti-Consumerist Graffiti

One of the things that struck me about Cyprus were the ubiquitous American consumer logos...Coca Cola, Starbucks, TGI Friday's, Bennegins, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and the list goes on and on. I should not have been surprised given the state of globalized commercialism. And yet, I found signs of displeasure with it. Within moments of our arrival in Nicosia, I saw the "McCancer" stencil not far from the a tourist area near the border. I began to see more and more of these subtle stenciled works.

I began to think of these not simply as graffiti dirtying up the walls of the city, but as contests over place. In my posting from 2 weeks ago about Cyprus and contested space, I noted that, "the island rests divided by political, religious, and other ideological space imprinted upon the literal space of the island." Here is a physical space that has come to carry an ideological critique. An "anti capitalista" ideology must live among some segment of this community to emerge into an attempt at claiming space.

I find these subversive and witty little stencils compelling evidence of contested space.

Cyprus & Contested Spaces

Yesterday morning I sat out on the balcony to read and enjoy some coffee as Larnaca slowly came to life. I picked up Philip Sheldrake’s Spaces for the Sacred again to review his comments on contested space…another of the central ideas following me in Cyprus. Even long before the 1974 revolution, this place has been contested…likely even back to the times of the ancient settlements that we are excavating. Looking on the internet I learned of the shooting at Holocaust Museum in DC. This tragic event is only additional proof of the contested nature of space and memory.

The DC event is not unique but it is complex. The museum, full of painful memory for most of the world, rests in an uneasy tension, like the sites of the Holocaust themselves, between the extremes of sacred and profane sites. They are at once set aside, protected, and made visible for memorial purposes, thus they seem to function like many truly sacred sites. And yet, they are record to the horrific atrocities that humanity is capable of. A sort of complexity begins when the ideological, political space is enacted or embodied within a literal space. In the DC event, an anti-Semetic ideology become embodied in a violent action within this space. While I dare say that most of the world would acknowledge the Holocaust and its lingering memories and sites, this was an act of contesting both space and memory.

I mention this all as preface to the Cypriot situation. Here the island rests divided by political, religious, and other ideological space imprinted upon the literal space of the island. The North and its Turkish influence is often painted as the aggressor holding the Greek land hostage since 1974. While this past is too complex and long for me to recount here (as if I even know enough about it to do so), Cyprus is a fine example of contested space. A few days ago Becky Savaria, and undergraduate from Messiah College made a fine posting on the PKAP Undergraduate Blog regarding these tensions as they are made evident here in Larnaca (a central city within the Greek side of the island). Greek Cypriots who were displaced during the revolution have employed some subtle and not so subtle ways of carrying on their memories of the 1974 events (As Becky's post suggests). The image here is another of those place memories that inheres a political statement as well. Famagusta is one of the Turkish occupied cities lost to the North in '74. This shop owner, and many like them, keep the collective memory alive, as well as their political allegiance in a public way. For many tourists who do not know the tragic history of this remarkable island, these are simple store names rather than signs of contested space and memory.

Place studies have historically focussed on a singularity of meaning the work of Mircea Eliade's work. Not until recently have scholars begun to question the political nature of place/space and the pluralities of meaning and interpretations offered by distict people groups. Place in general, and sacred spaces in particular are "just as likely to cause division as provoke consensus and harmony" (Sheldrake, 5). Once postmodernity had moved past Eliade's modern concepts of singularlized placed meaning, we are allowed to see the power of naming place. Paul Ricouer also suggests that we look to the narrative of the oppressed and in so doing we examine place by which stories are being told and which are being suppressed. The French philosopher Henri LeFebvre reminds us that the ways of which we understand space is historically conditioned. His "socio-spatial outlook" becomes our means of orienting both ideologically and literally in our environments. It would seem that the metanarratives of those in power become culturally and even in the case of these images, architecturally embodied to reinforce the Greek Cypriot narrative. Sheldrake reminds us that with such images or narratives of power, there seems to be a responsibility to explore the variety of meanings (told and untold) upon any given site.

What does this mean for photography today, and for me particularly on a residency in an ongoing contested space? I haven't work this out yet, but when I look at other contemporary landscape photographers like Jeff Brouws, Edward Burtynsky, John Ganis and others, ones notes a sort of objectivity of their work, a sort of banality in composition renders these politicized places as cultural oddities. Certainly their choice of subject denotes a subjectivity of the artist, but they are imaged in a manner that offers sort of enduring grace in the degraded environment. Could this be a way forward? Can such images be made of contested spaces that are open enough in meaning to allow suppressed narratives to emerge? Can the two coexist in an image?

Sorry for the roughness of these thoughts...writing usually helps me clarify my thoughts. I think these need more work.