Post-installation collaboration, Saunder’s Farm, Garrison, NY

We don’t usually expect that a sculpture will change after the installation.  But things are different out on the farm.  There are those who scratch their backs on our work, and who like the crunch of fallen trampled parts, and the taste of print and cardboard.

What I installed:

Shelter, A Book of Doors, featured in my previous post

 

They who scratched their backs and trampled and nibbled, after finishing their main course:



The collaboration, with new meanings, perhaps. 
The spine of the book is now quite visible.
The tasty door-pulls have been replaced: cardboard and text.
Yes, they ate words.

 

              Signed.

Shelter, A Book of Doors

I've been volunteering at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, giving collage workshops.  I got the idea of collages from participating in Carla Rae Johnson's Alternet, for which I made many many tiny collages.  HASK serves 1200 lunches a day, but people can come for seconds, so maybe it's 800 people daily, and we try to entice them up to the monthly-soon-to-be-weekly workshops.  A few come.  One woman who comes regularly is an active artist.  One man who comes loves to draw, is an artist too.  Others are curious beginners.  I also mentor at the Interfaith Assembly for Homelessness and Housing, in a one-on-one program called Panim al Panim (face to face). 

So the obvious next step for me is to put together my art practice with what I learn from HASK and IAHH, and with my current obsessions - doors, and always shelters, always some kind of room, since the beginning of my sculpture making.  With open walls, they are spaces that are both defining and liberating.

This year I built Shelter, A Book of Doors for the Farm Project 2015, of Collaborative Concepts, in Garrison, NY.

                                    Shelter, A Book of Doors, painted wood, cardboard,

                                                      book pages, bicycle wheels,  7' x 7' x 5'

 

The "book covers" are hollow core doors.  The "pages/doors" are built and have missing panels, and door-pulls made of cardboard, the iconic material of homelessness, or our idea of it.  The "spine" is supported inside with ribs of tossed-off bent bicycle wheels.  My idea is that shelter for me might be reading a good book in a quiet corner somewhere, and out of the corner of my eye I acknowledge that someone else has an entirely different idea of that word, shelter.  The door pulls are covered in text and photos removed (gulp) from books.

In the coming year, I hope to exhibit a large sculpture that displays the collages being made at Holy Apostles.

A fortune in doors

I recently wrote a short essay for a memoir writing class that was really about feminism and my relationship with my mother.  But in it I mentioned doors in almost every paragraph.  She stood in the doorway of my bedroom watching me, pre-kindergarten, play with my dollhouse,  and I stood in her doorway watching her ironing, and subsequent doors.  But the interesting part is that doors are now a significant part of the art I make in three-dimensions.  Last year for the Collaborative Concepts show in Garrison, NY, my work had three doors in an otherwise open frame.  This year my work in that show will be made entirely of doorframes, but with doorknobs (somehow, haven't figured it out yet).  And this is a model I built for a proposal, “Home”, yes, this is a model, 8” high, shot lying flat on my stomach in Sakura Park.

The best part of this story is that in the spring, I went to a Chinese restaurant with 3 friends.  Three of the “fortunes” in the cookies were, you know, meh, but I had this one: “Doors will open in all areas of your life.”  So pay attention.

Staten Island the Sneaker

We all know that Italy looks like a boot, a very high over the knee boot, and Oh, poor Sicily.

But have you looked closely at Staten Island?  On the New York City subway map, it's quite clear.

Staten Island the Sneaker.  All it needed was laces.