Shared Spaces Post #1 - Developing a New Art Concept

Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at Shared Spaces, my new social practice art project.  I’ll be sharing my process - my puzzles, hopes and uncertainties through which, with luck, you will be able to experience what it feels like for an artist to make the transition from making ‘things’ to making art in a community, art that seeks to change hearts and minds and respond to the needs of that community.  You’ll get to watch as I steer and bump my way to art that becomes a shared common experience, a way for us to learn together, and to engage new voices in the Contemporary Art process.

Me, looking entirely out of place, with my cousin and close childhood friend Bruce on the first trip to Paris, Tennessee.  (I loved it, but politely declined the AR-15 with Bumpstock for future trips)

Where to start?  A few years ago, I realized that I honestly didn’t know enough about the parts of the US outside my familiar coastal-urban circuit. No one I talked to in New York and nothing I was watching or reading seemed able to explain it to me either.  I took a few trips to Tennessee to see one of my California cousins who had relocated there and got really excited – it felt almost like another country!  I rode around in a pickup truck and talked to a guy about his Harley.  Shot cans in the field behind the woods.  I came back and told all my Chelsea art friends about it.  How could I get 20 of us together to just go be in Tennessee for a long weekend, just to ride around and talk to people, go to a barbecue, maybe even shoot at some stumps?  My friend Seph Rodney at Hyperallergic listened thoughtfully and gave me a key piece of advice: you have to figure out a project-- a thing to do together--  to give everybody a reason to be there.

Seph’s idea made sense, and I started casting around for a likely project. I had been making wall relief sculptures with dozens of found objects and cultural elements. After watching an episode of Homeland, with the American flag in the credits, everything clicked: we could make flags together- relief sculpture American flags.  People would bring along objects that were meaningful to them, or pick something out from objects I provided, and we would fill the flag with them in a sort of sculptural collage.  I started applying to residencies and figured out how to take my show on the road- how we could make these wall relief sculptures in remote locations outside my well-equipped studio.   

Removing the clay mold material to reveal plaster relief sculpture – a Work in Progress

My hope is this will open up doors and give me a way to meet people I would never otherwise have any interaction with. Break down some of the stigma around each of our ‘types’ and let real people start to interact despite our different cultural and political viewpoints.  In the end, I’m hoping I can do these projects with different communities all around the country and somehow get a richer understanding of who we are as a nation, of our complexity and diversity. I’ve decided to call it Shared Spaces: a journey into different aspects of American society that remain hidden in plain sight.  And to reach even higher, in these fractured contentious times, to uncover some kind of new narrative at the end of all this – some hint or evidence pointing to some kind of new way for us all to live alongside each other despite our differences.  I’m hoping to recover, uncover, discover some kind of new way for us to be Americans.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Social Practice Artist with NYC Sanitation Department worker (image courtesy Social Practice Queens)

In recent years I’ve  been looking at lots of artists who do Social Practice art, working with communities of people and making some kind of societal change the point of the work they do.  People like Pablo Helguera, Trevor Paglen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mel Chin.  It’s a new-ish field and still wide open to innovation which feels refreshing.  I’ll dig deeper into some of these artists and their work soon in a future post, and will keep returning to their and others’ work in the field to draw contrasts, parallels and lessons as I embark in this new direction.

Shared Spaces - Ways of Healing - Learning to live together again in America

Conflict, mistrust, anger - America is a divided place. We may live in one country but increasingly it feels fractured - Red State and Blue State, Republicans and Democrats, gun owners and those who want them restricted or banned. Men and women, people of different races and backgrounds and histories. Urban Coastal and Rural, the 1-percenters and everybody else, all living out our visions of rights and duties and often enough bristling with feelings of injustice.

What can anyone do? In the past year I've been going to parts of America different than what I'm used to. For me that means rural and inland areas, whether in Texas or Tennessee or rural places nearer home. I'll be doing an artists' residency in north Georgia in June, with more scheduled throughout the year in the Midwest and West.

I don't make a lot of specific plans. I've just been showing up, being available to talk and to listen.   Bit by bit I'm learning about other ways of being American. This year I'll focus on rural places where my great grandparents lived-  places "I" might be living today if not for some quirk of fate or a decision made by an ancestor a century ago.

What is coming out of these journeys is a series of interactions and writings along with a new body of work: Shared Spaces. Inside the frame of each sculptural relief are signs and symbols and reminders of lots of different ways of being American. Guns and pickup trucks, Goldman Sachs and CNN. Cigarettes and soft drinks and granola. It's all mixed up, finding a way to exist together in Shared Space. I'm hearing a new set of voices out there:   Even if many of us never come to like each other or understand or agree with each other we still need to figure out how to live together, somehow. Following this process, and the interactions and art projects flowing out of it are my way of working on this, my way of healing.

Contemporary Relief Wall Art

Creating a new body of work that connects me to long traditions in sculpture- wall relief art-  that are for some reason not widely pursued by sculptors today.  It has been fun figuring out a new way of working that has immediacy, cultural resonance, flexibility and feels alive.  Process is a blend of 3-d printing, direct carving, mold-making,  life-casting, and press-molding.  Learning to think inside-out-and-backwards and relishing the surprises.  This next sentence is for the bot-like non-humans because this is the place they love to come and read and feed, and they must be fed!   contemporary sculpture relief art, wall-mounted.  contemporary art and sculptural innovation.

contemporary relief wall art, Cultural Landscape Series #45, bob clyatt sculpture 201742cm x 260cm x 10cm deep.

Contemporary Relief Sculpture and Heads Sculpture

In an attempt to ensure people can find my work according to the kinds of things they like to search for, this page is my way of dealing with that.  Humans will probably find things more interesting on other parts of the site.  Thanks for visiting :-)

Below is an example of my contemporary relief art, a traditional-referencing bas-relief or alto high relief sculpted art form.  Art using Brands and Logos, as well as figurative relief art sculpture.  This art also uses emojis in contemporary art.

Contemporary Relief Sculpture Art, wall-mounted relief art, Cultural Landscape series, Bee Art

I also have large head sculptures for public art installations, as well as smaller wall-mounted sculptures of face art and head sculptures for collectors.  These head sculpted contemporary art is the latest evolution from my wall-mounted head sculptures.

(E)scape New faces public art Head sculptures installed outdoors at Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem NYC.  Photo Courtesy Hyperallergic.  They engage the community in a dialog with art, an aspect of art social practice outreach art in a community of color.  This is inspired by the work of such artists as Theaster Gates and Nick Cave.