Recent Screenprints by ap-art-ment, in residence at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY

Far Along: Drawing by Depth in Shifting Margins

Far Along: Drawing by Depth, 2012.  Shaved red carpet, 3x25'.

Far Along: Drawing by Depth is included in Shifting Margins, a show curated by OFF Space.  The work is installed in the portion of the show that takes place at Aggregate Space in Oakland.

Shifting Margins includes an international roster of artists delving into the theme of marginalization; expanding upon ideas of aspiration, futility, exclusion, hope, fear and the desire to understand and be understood.

Shifting Margins embraces the center, the periphery and the bridge between in part, through the use of two locations “The City” (San Francisco) the perceived cultural and social center and its “marginal” sister city (Oakland) nodal point of racial and social upheaval.

Exhibition Runs and locations*

Aggregate Space, 801 West Grand St, Oakland CA 94607

September 21 through October 20th 2012

*Artists Reception Friday September 21st 6 - 10pm

*First Friday (Oakland Art Murmur) Friday October 5th 5 - 8pm

*Live Stream Presidential Debate Tuesday October 16th 5:30 - 10pm

Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom St, San Francisco CA 94110

September 27th through November 10th 2012

*MAPP (Mission Arts Performance Project), Saturday October 6^th video screening 6 - 10pm

*Artist Reception Thursday October 11th 6 - 10pm

*Curators Talk Wednesday November 7^th 6 – 8pm

ap-art-ment's recent cairn drawings

project sail: Labor Day

Tide chart for next sail: Labor Day!

Documenta 13

ap-art-ment at Documenta 13, July 2012

Reading list archive

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/361

http://www.sjmusart.org/content/domestic-odyssey

http://www.artpractical.com/index.php?/feature/interview_with_david_ireland/

http://badatsports.com/2009/the-domestic-art-space-tales-from-two-cities/

http://667shotwell.com/ChrisSollars.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/garden/10galleries.html?_r=2

Kiki Smith: A Gathering 1980-2005 by Siri Engberg

Gilbert and George by Tate Modern Publishing

Overlay by Lucy Lippard

Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark by Pamela M. Lee

Pop Art by Lucy Lippard

Artist Communities: A Directory of Residencies that Offer Time and Space for Creativity by the Alliance of Artist Communities

Not At Home: The Suppression Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, edited and introduced by Christopher Reed

Chick Flicks by B. Ruby Rich

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art by Rebecca Solnit

Framer Framed by Trinh T. Minh-Ha

Art/Women/California 1950-2000 edited by Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni

Far Along, Part I

Collaboration between ap-art-ment and JMU Fiber Arts students

ap-art-ment was born in 2009 in San Francisco.  ap-art-ment's focus is to look for existing social structures that can be examined and used as contemporary art outposts: for instance the home of a curator, the hulls of various boats, a kitchen, the seats of a car, a neighbor's front stoop.  Though sites have remained crucial to the disequilibrium we find valuable in this project, equally are the events and collaborative works produced: public roundtable discussions, collaborative sculptures made with students across the country, lessons, film screenings with explication by professors in various fields, public performance, mobile studio spaces, and inclusive, experimental social exchanges. 

ap-art-ment contains a tripartite philosophy: mobile platform, shared authorship and collaborative modes of production. We share the authorship of work by remaining vulnerable, by being open to suggestions, by inviting influence.  We collaborate in the project so that an idea that has multiple etymologies can be as varied in its fabrication as it is in its genesis.

Far Along is a multi-piece project focused on transformations: passive observer to active participant, strangers into community, mobile experiment to fixed exhibition. The first stage of Far Along will culminate in a boat expedition/mobile exhibition to the Farallon Islands, officially a part of the City of San Francisco, though 27 miles offshore.  Forty-five participants will sail under the Golden Gate Bridge, and out into the Pacific Ocean to the shark-filled waters and aviary habitat of the mythic Farallon Islands. This intimate and challenging setting is an important feature of ap-art-ment projects: the act of sharing an immediate environment and the potential for influence that exists when people find themselves forming transient communities in an immersive space. The space of the Bay, the boat, and the aesthetic experience of the expedition are framed upon return as passenger-participants become reoriented to the city's pace, proximity to the water they just occupied, and the collective consumption of products

and culture provided by the ports and manufacturing industry.

ap-art-ment’s past two boat exhibitions/expeditions, The Essential Voyage and The Incredible Hull, sailed participants around the San Francisco Bay, allowing for a collective experience of this tumultuous landscape, varied and new perspectives of the cities that surround the San Francisco Bay, and a closer proximity to the systems of transportation and commerce (from the Golden Gate and Bay bridges and ports to the vast shipping containers passed en-route).  We believe the space of the home and the hull of a boat contain flexibility and maneuverability, and accommodate the different paces of growth needed for projects that contain extensive communication, intimacy in exhibition and performance, and wide-ranging research and involvement.

Far Along, Part 1:

The cairn, not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge, is both an elaborate and beautiful marker, and a fixed memorial to the those who have died there, but it is also a complicated indexical object which carries the information of current location and time.  From the Inuits to Native Americans to the Celts, cairns have been used to mark pathways or trails, to give direction to those walking.  It has been used by seafaring peoples to mark the coastline, regarding ports or important fishing locations that would be lost without such an indicator on land. They are sites of memorializing those who have died, as reliquaries of the dead, the hopes and prayers for that spirit as it passes on to next lives or the hereafter, as positions of memory, honor, and visitation.  The cairn as an object has a brilliance in that it can be added to, and as the act of adding to the object grows it, it also diversifies its form, and its content.  It is an archive of the activity that has created it.

Thank you to Pat Augsburger for inviting us to be visiting artists at JMU and for the chance to work with her students to make this exhibition at the Smith House Gallery.   Thank you to the students for working thoughtfully and intensely with us during this project.

Images courtesy of Pat Augsburger, 2012

Far Along- The Details

Far Along Workshop

Cathy and I spent last week working with Pat Augsburger's fiber arts students at James Madison University on an installation called Far Along, Part I at the Smith House Gallery.  

Thanks to the students for all of their hard work and dedication to this project.

Participating student artists: Blakely Cohen, Tiara Lovelace, Evan Norris, Ciara Reid, Eliza Tuttle, Amanda Wesely, Shea Goitia and Morgan McDonald.

Far Along, Part I: ap-art-ment collaborates with students in James Madison University's Fibers Art Department

ap-art-ment has spent the last week working with JMU's Fiber Arts students to create vessels that have been piled into a large-scale cairn in the gallery of the Smith House in Harrisonburg, VA.  This project, titled Far Along, Part 1, is a part of a larger ongoing project about journeys and markers.

Salon Show, Pop Up Art House, opens this weekend

PUAH Gallery presents: Salon Show February 18th - March 24th, 2012 Salon reception for the artists & writers: Saturday, February 18th from 6-8pm

24 artists from as far wide as New York, San Francisco, Ohio, LA & LV will be exhibiting in PUAH Gallery's first group show. As in the tradition of the original salon shows, the invitation was spread to art school campuses throughout the southwest. The show will feature students, recent grads, emerging and established artists in a jostling of paintings, drawings and sculpture. Following the tradition that is credited with the inception of the modern art critic, a Gazette will be produced featuring musings by critics, writers, poets, editors and the artists themselves. To further our amusement with the theme of a gallery mocking a museum, the Salon Show will also feature a gift shop complete with artistic goods and merchandise. Following the poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!", artists will be taking vintage objects and rendering them a twist. Expect the gallery acronym PUAH (meaning "splendid" in Hebrew) embellished on goods. Come join the fun at our Salon opening and gather in refined conversation, relish in floor to ceiling art, read all about it in the Gazette and take home a commemorative coffee mug!

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Jason Adkins, Mark Brandvick, Matthew Couper, Rory Devine, Catherine Fairbanks, Laura Boles Faw, Ellary Eddy, Jared Flores, Susanne Forestieri, Drina Fried, Wendy Kveck, Matthew Marchand, Jane Marquez, Mark Mellon, Ford Minton, Ann Mowry, Brent Payne, David Sanchez Burr, Jim Seely, Kathleen Strukoff, Markus Tracy, Jevijoe Vitug, Holly Vaughn and Greta Waller SELECTED WRITERS: Jay Burton (writer/Unnatural Light), Gregory Crosby (poet), Scott Dickensheets (editor/writer), Hugh Fogel (founder Unica Home), Mat Gleason (Coagula/Huffington Post), Danielle Kelly (critic), Andrew Kiraly (editor/writer), Jenesca Kenway (critic) and Kristen Peterson (arts writer)

ap--art-ment's show is a Top Pick!

Because we can't help ourselves and are so unbelievably flattered, here's a link to Las Vegas Weekly's top picks for 2011.  ap-art-ment's About the Thing and the Thing Itself at Pop Up Art House was their #1 pick for art exhibitions!!!  Thanks to Matthew Marchand and to Shannon Mc Mackin for giving us the opportunity to put this show together.  And thank you to all of our friends who travelled from San Francisco, LA, and Virginia to support us and see the show!

http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2011/dec/29/2011-year-review-art-and-theater/

Myth, detail

Myth, detail
ap-art-ment
2011
pencil, paper

Myth is a set of limited edition drawings by ap-art-ment.
The artist not-so alone in her studio...

a moment of John Dewey

"Emotions are attached to events and objects in their movement (environment). They are not private."

-John Dewey, Art as Experience

ap-art-ment asks, are they social?