Preview
Creation Date
Winter 2016
Description
Graduate student, year of graduation: 2017. Major: Teaching + Learning in Art and Design. Class: Experiments in Drawing. Faculty: Kevin Zucker.
Materials + Techniques
Digital Print on Paper
Measurements
h: 4", w: 6", d: 0.25"
Student Narrative
This book was a visual exploration of ways in which a contemporary artist’s personal and social investigation of place might lead to the generation of culture, historical exchange, and socio-economic development in a specific locality. As Lucy Lippard stated in “Lure of the Local: A Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society”: As envisionaries, artists should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant cultures’ rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythical and cultural dimensions of public experience, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historical constructions of place. The dialectic between space and change can provide the kind of no-man’s-land where artists thrive. The book is a proposition for future social sculpture. It is a flip book of ideas and precedent meant to impart a sense of urgency. It includes work from my personal collection of postcards of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. As regulation increases, the fishing tradition in Gloucester, MA (the oldest seaport in America) has shifted and a culture of artists and fishermen fight to keep their traditions alive in the face of gentrification. This book takes the form and shape of a postcard epistolary, citing works that play with the notion of gentrification and ocean from contemporary artists like Daniel Bozhkov and Constance Hockaday, while also referencing the tradition of Cape Ann Painting with etchings from Winslow Homer. Historical exchange is crucial to the survival of tradition; contemporary reverence coupled with artist understanding could provide hope for the future.