An indispensable series of conversations on the nature of art and community have been taking place around the country as part of a project at the Center for Community Change. Called Bridge Conversations, they are being posted on Community Arts Network.

One of the things we learned is that some of the most creative strategies live in the intersections of disciplines, sectors, cultures and generations. We also found that many of the most effective people we met were those who are building bridges and creating hybrid and integrated programs and strategies. This series of essays seeks to learn from a diverse group of these creative people who recognize and further deep connections between environment, education, community development, politics, social service, public health and anthropology, and art and culture. While we started out focusing primarily on people’s work, we soon found that the journey to a holistic perspective includes people’s personal lives– how they grow up, how they connect cultures and world views and how they balance their personal life and their work.

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Minidoka on My Mind, Roger Shimomura’s new exhibition, opens May 8th in New York City at Flomenhaft Gallery. His unparalleled insights into the conditions of life in Japanese internment camps during WW II stunningly blend humor and popular culture styling with an unmistakable– and unforgettable bite.

Fernetici / Fernetti, video still, 2008

Ljubljana has currently no major exhibition space for contemporary art, with the exception of important independent spaces such as Skuc Galerija and P74. Although both galleries have socially and politically relevant shows on display, Mala Galerija, the contemporary art affiliation of the momentarily closed Moderna Galerija, presents the most compelling one: Lost Territories.

Considering every European nation as having a larger territory in its memory, sometimes extending beyond its present day borders, artist Saso Sedlacek regards territory not only as an abstract notion. In our everyday life, it is in the first place a piece of real estate: the house or apartment in which we live.

Trieste and its surrounding area is a historically traumatic region for both Italy and Slovenia. Once a grand cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian city, it lost its central European setting after the First World War and became gradually a declining Italian harbor town. Trieste was the window onto the world for many Slovenes and consequently it permanently marked Slovene culture. Being close to Ljubljana, the two cities grew apart over the years.

With Lost Territories, Saso Sedlacek proposes to bring the two cities back together, imagining that eliminating the border in people’s minds would be mutually beneficial. He provokingly states: “In Kosovo, Albanians bought overpriced real estate from the local Serbian population for several decades and consequently established an independent state. Real estate in Trieste, which is an hour’s drive away from Ljubljana, is at the moment cheaper than in Slovenia. Today there is no longer a need to create new countries or officially move the borders in Europe. As is evident in Kosovo, these can be moved simply from one apartment to another.”

The exhibition is based on research into specific aspects of the elimination of the border between Italy and Slovenia caused by the Slovenian inclusion in the EU in 2004. The artist designed a new flag that combines the respective flags of both countries and hung it for one day at the border between Italy and Slovenia.

Lost Territories displays this flag as well as a video that documents the action. Different available real estate in Trieste is on display while a computer allows the visitor to go online and actually buy the property. Dealing with environmental issues in the broadest sense of the word, Saso Sedlacek redefines common notions of Slovene national identity within global trends of technology, ecology and the ideological void after the transition period.

Here for Saso Sedlacek.

When working on SonicAnta in the Sonoran Desert, Glenn Weyant is closely watched by armed US border patrol officers, The Department of Homeland Security and the Police Department of the City of Nogales, AZ. Despite all the authoritative attention, Weyant keeps his cool and continues drumming modified chop sticks against the steel wall of the US-Mexcican boarder. Slowly moving along, he takes a cello bow and begins to play the barbed wire fences and other landmarks and objects separating Mexico and the United States.

Weyant is a visionary- a sonic visionary to be exact. Carefully recording the ambient noises produced, he converts these experimental performances into mixed sound collages that set new standards for the realm of experimental sound recording and align themselves artistically with other groundbreaking sound design experiments, such as All Ice Records from Norway.
The Anta Project blurs the lines between sociopolitical art and experimental music. By reinventing the barrier fence into an electro-acoustic instrument, Weyant breaches on the controversial issue of US boarder control. His comment: “It’s an easy way of galvanizing the tension. We don’t have solutions, but at least we can have a focal point for our fear: ‘We built a wall, we’re safe.’ But if the border has become a symbol of national insecurity, why can’t we take the symbol and turn it on its head? Let’s transform the wall, reconceptualize it as a bridge between two worlds.”
I also urge you to check out on the website what the US and the Mexican government both had to say about his artwork.
A solid piece of work- thank you.

Pau D’Amato, ‘Bedroom Door’, 2007

In his thoughtful exhibition essay accompanying Black Is, Black Ain’t, curator Hamza Walker considers race as a biological fiction “that remains a social fact whose history more than compensates for all that science disavows.” Taking its title from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it explores a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. The exhibition brings together works by 26 black and non-black artists whose work together examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called “blackness” is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant.

At the Renaissance Society in Chicago, until June 8.

Feeling deceived and pessimistic after the 2004 US presidential election, Seattle artists Deborah Faye Lawrence conducted an e-mail survey asking artists, writers, friends and strangers to share their concept of an ideally perfect place, and their thoughts on the social, political and moreal aspects of this utopia. Simply she asked:”What does utopia look like to you?” The 15,000 words which she received in response to her question were then worked into her art and resulted in 26 mixed-media collages that critically and satirically speak out against injustice and apathy.

“Treating pictures and words with equal weight, it is not only what Lawrence says, but how she says it. Images shift in scale and pictoral style. Photographs, reproductions, occasionally painted illustrations and words are flawlessly integrated within an imaginary field….She lays her heart and intellect on the line in each piece. While her arguably relevant concerns are set out with communication as a goal, each narrative is laced by the sheer power of what David Hickey called to our attention several years ago- visual beauty. And that, matched with intellect and passion, is immensely satisfying.”
-Frances De Vuono, Review Artsweek, September 2006

‘Dee Dee Does Utopia’, Deborah Faye Lawrence, Published by Marquand Books, 2008

Eyebeam’s expansive exhibition FEEDBACK brings together a wide variety of artists, designers, architects and engineers on the topic of “sustainability”. Projects range from public art projects and industrial design to DIY energy solutions and software tools, to inspire discussion and action around a topic that is becoming increasingly meaningless and overused.

The works on display are intended to enlighten and entertain, and ultimately compel viewers to move beyond passive spectatorship. Some of the projects explore civic engagement: Lean Gauthier’s Sow-In (see image above) activates the public, in partnership with local community gardening groups, to sow the seeds of those food plants most in danger of extinction.

Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley’s DrinkPeeDrinkDrinkPee questions the role that our bodies play in larger eco-systems. The project includes an installation and a DIY kit for turning your pee into fertilizer. Other ones, such as Andrea Polli’s Queensbridge Wind Power Project, offer conceptual proposals. Polli investigates how clean renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge.

FEEDBACK is there to challenge and inspire, and while doing so offers pro-active but critical alternatives to the unsustainability of our way of life and culture in general.

Here for Eyebeam.

Most Americans have a pretty good idea of the number of US casualties in the Iraq war, but a recent study showed that many are oblivious or completely underestimate the number of Iraqi civilian killed over the past five years after US-Iraq invasion.

“Margot Norris explains the discrepancy between public perception and body count data as the result of de facto practices by the Pentagon. By restricting press access to the suffering, the government systematically obscures public knowledge, which in turn blocks affect, empathy, and protest. The moral and political defeat in Vietnam helped usher in the illusion that human loss is irrelevant to military success.”

Currently a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Alyssa Wright’s mobile protest art piece aims at depicting the death toll of Iraqi civilians. The project consists of a backpack, two confetti cannons, and a GPS unit. Every night the location of the most recent bombings in Baghdad are downloaded onto the unit and superimposed onto a map of the city of Boston. When the next day a person wearing the backpack enters a site in Boston which corresponds to that of a bombed location in Baghdad, the cannons immediately fire thousands of paper scraps into the air, each inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war.

To read more about the Cherry Blossom Project click this link.

Now more than half a century old, the bar code has unobtrusively integrated itself into our everyday lives, as it is practically found on almost all purchasable items in the western hemisphere. Department stores, super markets, bookstores, box offices, and local retail stores are all dependent on the little B&W-stripes and number logo, also known as the UPC- the Universal Product Code. The bar code is also widely used for tracking the movement of items from simple mail to airline luggage, nuclear waste and, with the new biometric passports, even ourselves.

With only a few deviations from its original design in the early 70’s, the bar code seems stagnant and timeless. In contemporary art it has been a source for much inspiration as many artists (such as Scott Blake and Banksy below), leverage its uniformity as a powerful tool for social critique.

Others, such as Moscow based design studio Art. Lebedev Studio get a kick out of retrieving the bar code symbol in our everyday environment, which they exhibit on their website.

A different, more commercial take on the bar code design was initiated by the Japaneses design team called Design Barcode in 2005. They began to think about how to revolutionize the bar code and its mundane design by making it more exciting and noticeable. For them, the lack of attention we consumers pay to the bar code is a waste of “valuable product real estate”. Whether or not we agree that this is necessary or a move into the right direction, I nevertheless recommend you to check out their ideas on how to linking a product with functional and innovative bar code design on their gallery.

NaJa & deOstos, The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad, 2008

In a recent article published on the Foreign Policy in Focus website, Provisions’ associate John Feffer writes about a compelling political project initiated by artist Joseph DeLappe. Iraqimemorial.org is an online exhibition and call for participation to propose concepts for memorials to the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in the War. DeLappe has invited artists, architects and designers to submit their projects to a website, where they will be judged by jurors and the general public. The website itself will then be a virtual monument to the 81,632-1,120,000 civilians who have died. Reflecting on various issues that block the actual realization of monuments, Feffer writes: “In a world increasingly dominated by Facebook, Google and YouTube, such a virtual monument may well have as much longevity as anything made of concrete or granite.”

The diversity of approaches is remarkable:

* A three-panel painting of an aerial attack on civilians in homage to Diego Rivera.
* A representation of a wall destroyed by a bomb attack.
* A billboard proclaiming This War Is Unjust.
* A thin copper strip that encircles Baghdad.
* Photographs of a model in various locations wearing a T-shirt saying Kiss Me I’m Iraqi on one side and Kill Me I’m Iraqi on the other.
* Test of tubes of blood substituting for the profits of major oil companies as represented in a bar graph.
* A garden in the shape of Iraq.

Here for the online exhibition.

Here for the article.

Sam Durant, Proposal for Iraq War Memorial, Symbolic Transposition of effects of war in Iraq to the U.S. and England: 10 Downing St., Parliament, U.S. Capitol and the White House [detail], 2007

The ICA in London did a similar project last year when they invited 26 artists from around the world and used the exhibition medium as a backdrop for proposed memorials to the War. The memorials addressed topics such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country’s slide into civil war, the deaths of soldiers and civilians, and the conflict’s relation to global jihadism and the War on Terror. The exhibition was self-critical, in the sense that it recognized the impossibility of finding a definitive memorial. It explored different views of the Iraq War and questioned what can or should be memorialized in the context of an ongoing conflict.

Here for an article on the ICA show, Memorial to the Iraq War.