The Collaborative Landscape

This is my latest Video of The Collaborative Landscape project. I was fortunate to be selected as an Artist At The Center and work with Pete Rush and their crew to produce four paintings in a 90 minute pop-up on the Mural Amphitheater stage.

I felt proud to be performing in a pop-up that would be an unexpected artistic experience for other visitors. I have hosted these painting events in public places, but not in a hub of culture so globally connected. Considering that the theme of the event is the collaboration of strangers, it was especially meaningful for me to paint with people from different cultures and have it received so universally. 

Artists At the Center is a multi-year collaboration between Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and Seattle Center, with support from Uptown Arts & Culture Coalition and the communities adjacent to Seattle Center campus. The project is made possible by a 10-year grant from Climate Pledge Arena and Seattle Kraken. 

I am a process based painter in a wheelchair who collaborates with strangers to complete large paintings in participatory public events. I use video to document the relationships people form as they participate in generative social systems.

I place a 16 foot canvas stretcher as a meeting table in a central clearing. Painters receive cups of iridescent mica flakes in solutions of water. In simultaneous corporations, each group of 20 pours a painting together. Compositions form as colors of individual flows curve towards weighted holes in the center of the canvas.

In our desire to impart something to others, conversations are created with pointing, naming and a dialectic back-and-forth across the table that has a forward movement. After a few minutes of recording this dialogue with microphones overhead, the painting is washed away and a new group is formed.

I am applying to grants and residencies in neighboring states, to take the table further towards my artistic and social edges, looking for contributions of dissimilar others, counterpoint and anomaly. The more diverse, limited or disparate the individuals or groups, the more unique and innovative the compositions will be.

I am interested in the inclusion of our limitations, making the case that the resistance we face in our struggles, along with the mistakes we make, have a generative friction.

This project was made possible by a 4Culture Art Projects grant which enabled the fabrication of the large canvas stretcher where we meet.