An Open World… WIP

More than any other project, this one truly took on a life of its own in both generative and destructive ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It allowed me to explore the tension that lives between the artist as individual and the artist as part of a much larger social system.

I had long carried a belief that, if a work was powerful enough, emotive enough that the power of art could overcome any number of numbnesses that humans take on in order to exist within… whatever you call this -late Capitalism? Neo-neo colonial Technofeudalism? Death throes Capitalism? What I understand now is my drive to challenge the limits of the white cube were driven by this altruistm that I now understand as naïvete.

The creation process was itself challenging and scaled up my plaster sculpture skills of which I was incredibly proud and aligned me with one of those creative process signposts that you are onto something beyond your limitations in that, by a twist of fate, I was able to make a short film in collaboration with the NFB using the audio from the Open World Gallery installation I had made. A completely unpredictable outcome that I still haven’t fully digested.

Perhaps I haven’t been able to fully process that success because concurrently, the Open World Gallery installation became an incredibly trying process. Both in the banality of its daily(ish) documentation but ultimately in the disillusionment of my naïveté at the knife point of a shiv.

Having been so careful to consider how I would document the installation without infringing on anybody’s right to privacy, my solution was to take photo’s with shallow depth perception in order to blur our any passer’s by at the bus stop on the far end of the vacant lot I had chosen as a location.  And it wasn’t the fact that the piece had been vandalized and the audio components taken, that to me seemed reasonable and I had experienced the opposite end of that when earlier there were foot prints that revealed someone had trudged through the snow to investigate the piece and walk away, which in my mind was evidence of my earlier altruistic hypothesis.

And it wasn’t even necessarily the knife threat, though that was terrifying. It was that the knife threat came while I was explaining what I was doing there.  Here I was, thinking I was bridging the art world with the non-art seeking public when, in no uncertain terms, my would- be bridge co-builder pulled a knife on me and told me to “get the f*** out of here with your bullsh**”.  Had I not had the chance to explain I think it would have been less dejecting but it was that I was excitedly explaining the project and met with complete non-recognition.  As though the words I was saying, not that I was being obtuse, were offensive.

Since then I have encountered this same disdain, albeit much subtler, in people that feel the act of art making is in itself arrogant or worse, delusional. I have even heard this from creative people struggling to give themselves permission to create.

Heartbreaking.

Though I set out to generate evidence for the unifying power of art, what I encountered was the tenuous and even threadbare relationship that we have as a consumer culture with creativity that is not product driven.

My naïveté has become a determination to not be sucked into this perspective which I see creeping slowly in on me as our social fabric is stretched ever thinner.  Art IS a kind of connective tissue, not the only kind but it’s one that has journeyed alongside the human experience.  It has value that cannot be described in currency. And though a commitment to its creation can be called delusional in the face of rising cost of living, it can also be a way in which I, among all other artists, work to preserve the human imagination from atrophy.