As we entered the second calendar year of global isolation and quarantine of varying degrees, I wanted to create a shared project that will put us into collaboration with strangers, that will lean into chance encounters and intimacy across distance. That will map moments, places, and gestures.
In January 2021, I launched five blank books into the world via the United States Post Office. Each book has its own theme, and will be touched by thirteen people (one for each of the new moons in 2021).
The themes are: A Naming | A Yearning | A Secret | A Disenchantment | A Eulogy
Falling into a familiar structure…a Western five-act play, stages of a human life, chapters of a fairy tale…these themes are meant to be toyed with, fucked with, inverted, interpreted personally or cynically, held up to the light, questioned, crumpled, and pushed through the gauntlet of whatever 2021 brings. At the end of the year, each of the five books will stand as an atlas of where and when they’ve been—thirteen ways of hearing, seeing, feeling, singing, bleeding, holding a phase/place of life.
At the end of the year, all books will be returned to me, at which time I will work to bring them in conversation with each other. I’ll curate an online gallery for participants to view and share.
Why this collaboration?
For the past twelve months it’s been perhaps clearer than it’s ever been: our daily lives and our futures are shaped by the decisions, the whims, the compassion, the selfishness, the commitment, and the shortcoming of strangers. We are in constant collaboration with people we’ve never met or thought of. Now, we do it on purpose.
Artists will be confronted by some context for the theme, as well as the prior artist’s offering. What does it mean to make art of/about/in response to another person’s secret, naming, yearning, disenchantment, eulogy? That is for each artist to decide.
What kind of art?
Also for the artist to decide. Anything that can fit in the book (folded, tethered, glued, and so on) without making it impractical for the next artist to mail, and without destroying another artist’s work. Pages may be added, the journal may be disassembled or recontexualized, papered over, doodled upon, singed, sewn. The art may be placed into the journal via QR code to a video or recording, by hyperlink, by staples, by tape, by soldering iron.
The only limitations are: 1. respect for other artists’ work & the collaborative nature of the object 2. mailability 3. imagination and willingness.
Why ATLAS?
With a gesture toward building a bound set of maps—maps of the moment, the distance (geographically, metaphorically) between minds and positionalities, the inherent lie of “you are here.” Life phases as spaces to inhabit. The authority of a dialogue, a question.