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
