Tomorrow I’m leaving for a residency called Signal Fire. Unlike other residency programs where artists are invited to stay on privately owned land, Signal Fire hosts its artists in a mobile home at the end of a logging road in the Mount Hood National Forest. According to Tarp and Amy, the organizers at Signal Fire, I don’t actually have to accomplish anything during my stay. However, in daydreaming about how I’d like to spend my time, I couldn’t help but come up with an action plan.
For the residency, I have invited three friends and fellow artists, Michael Reinsch, Ariana Jacob and Eric Steen, to engage in a five day discussion and research project focused around the tensions associated with choosing vs. making peace with the communities we are a part of in contemporary culture. Michael, Ariana and Eric have been invited to co-develop and influence the sequencing of daily activities and have agreed to structure our residency like an adult summer camp with daily reading assignments, unstructured leisure time and campfire discussions in the evenings.
My inspiration for this research project has to do with a joke some friends have about people who they’d “invite to the farm,” as in the farm they plan to live on after the apocalypse. The format of the Signal Fire residency, with it’s parameters of isolation in the wilderness, reminds me of back to the land utopian ideals, and the complication of those ideals that arises when people attempt to live them in tandem with others. I’m interested in thinking about what it means to be someone worthy of being on the farm, and what implications that idea has to us as artists and citizens.
In a way, I’ve put together my own farm. I’m not sure that I can recommend these individuals for day to day post-apocalyptic survival, however they are friends of mine who have unique insights into what it means to walk the line between chosen and incidental communities.
Ariana Jacob’s parents raised her in a remote location in Canada for the early part of her life while they lived off of the grid and grew their own food. Starting her life removed from any specific community, Ariana has spent her adult life exploring what it means to make a community, participating in the music and art culture of Olympia, WA, working as part of the collective management team at People’s Co-op and using art projects to ask questions about what it means to belong in our society.
Eric Steen grew up in the tight knit world of evangelical Christianity in the Bay Area. In his work, he often explores the ways in which people outside of the Christian community manifest their beliefs in the greater common good. While not religious, the utopian visions, pedagogical methodologies, science fiction movies and beer drinking communities Eric explores in his art projects rely on some level of faith or the suspension of disbelief as a mechanism for creating an idealized world.
Michael Reinsch claims that his only experience of belonging to a community occurred during the five years he played trombone in the Marion County Citizen’s Band during Oktoberfest in Mt. Angel, Oregon. He attributes his feelings of alienation to his own lack of ability to perceive his connectedness to others and compensates for these feelings by creating performance pieces that resemble parties and festivals that only he is invited to fully participate in.
I recently ended a five year collaboration with a group of artists who worked together to create an entire country complete with passports, flags and a currency of love and friendship. Having completed that project, I am using this residency to continue researching group dynamics, conflict and intentional community building.
Below is a brief reading list we’ve compiled together and a list of activities we’ve talked about trying out. I’ll take some pictures and post them here later. Also, we will be participating in an exhibit of all of the inaugural season residents’ work at Igloo Gallery October 1.
Reading/Activity list: Chapters 1-2 Spell of the Sensuous, “Composting” from Writing Down the Bones, Drop City, Digging a latrine, Material Thinking Sh*t Boots (apparently aka sh*thead), helping Eric to learn to sit up straight, baritone ukelele performances, Interview between Jerry Brown and Ivan Illich, and telling our life stories in an hour or less.
