Public Space One

Hi Sandbox readers! Erika and Chris here, PS1’s newest artist residents. We will be here for the remainder of the summer. Our goal is to collaborate and push ourselves into artistic directions we have not ventured into before. So far Erika has worked primarily in ink drawings that serve as a social critique of American culture. Chris works primarily through video and performance that uses violence and eroticism to explore the inner workings of ourselves. Together we look forward to becoming an active part of the community and sharing our work with the public.

As I begin a free artist residency at Public Space One, I’ve been given this opportunity to blog about the experience. By putting my thoughts (and my questions) out there in an open-ended forum, I hope to get comments and conversation back. The blog series will be a continuing thread, with Part Two elaborating and reflecting on Part One, and so on.

A. is an artist and a friend of time. She sent me letters affixed with clock-face stamps, often fit with little gifts of images and extra texts, ephemera, during the time I lived in New Orleans. When you open a friend’s letter, she has arrived. You host her thinking in language. Friendship, so often about sharing a specific space, becomes temporalized. Or it is about space, too, but now within language, opening up to recollection of the spaces you once shared, descriptions of the cities you now live in, the rooms in which you write…

During the Affect & Inquiry symposium sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (March 27-29) here in Iowa City, Ann Cvetkovich spoke at Public Space One about her interest in making scholarship into a creative practice. In my writing project at PS1, I’ve been interested in exploring this site of scholarship and creative writing. I’m trying to bring together disparate strands of research, to learn how to trace—in language—an attention to the surface of an artwork as well as to the corrugated surface of a relationship over time.