Let’s Vote on Possible Installations
So, today we had a little conversation about choosing a topic for our installation piece so that everyone who’s participating can begin gathering materials and making parts of it in their regular work at NUA. We came up with a few ideas.
Yearbooks Three Ways:
1) Yearbooks represent the official history of a high school student. But how many people’s lives really reflect what the yearbook tells us? Or, maybe your life looks like the yearbook sometimes and sometimes looks completely different. We could create a piece that talks about the relationship between official and unofficial histories. We were thinking specifically about the juxtaposition between typical portraits for the yearbook and the beautiful portraits of students in the front area of NUA. But this could include other media as well.
2) We all have different roles in our lives – student, teacher, sister, daughter, friend, athlete, etc., and sometimes we think of them as living in very separate parts of our lives. We could construct an installation that illustrates some different realms of life in an abstract way (home, school, NUA, for example), and map the connections between them with string or something else. Then others could begin to add / hang things on the connections
3) We could create a character, even create NUA as a character, and illustrate the roles and relationships in its (his? her?) life.
White Electric:
You all know the coffee shop, right? Well, it used to be a store that sold electrical appliances. A coffee maker IS an electrical appliance! White Electric does show art, and might be interested in hosting an installation of ours. We could build something really neat using a lot of coffee-related supplies -
• Make paper out of coffee filters
• Dye fabric or paper with coffee
• Make little Zen sand gardens out of coffee grounds
• Build sculpture out of old coffee pots and other supplies
• Make a bouquet of cords or use them to hang things from
• Make jewelry from the colorful wire within the cords (possibly at lock-in?)
• Coffee tins!
• Teabags
• Mugs, cups, (smash and make a mosaic?)
We could also create an installation on this theme in the window of NUA and point it towards White Electric.
History of (or Story of) NUA:
We could create a stratigraphy of histories of NUA using the variety of different media in the studio as different layers. So we could have photographic layers, printed layers, handmade paper layers, painted and drawn layers, fabric layers….
Ava and Ashley, we wanted to know if there are any stories that jump out for you for this option, since you’ve been at NUA the longest.
Anyway, please comment on these and let everyone know what your favorite option is so that we can pick a topic and start making stuff.
At first I was really into the idea of the stratigraphy because I’m a big fan of art that mimics scientific processes. But now I’m interested in uncovering as much history of the block as possible. We know what White Electric was before it was a coffee shop, we know what New Urban Arts was before it was an arts studio. What was the Subway? The hair salon? Ada Books?
-julia
| Posted 3 years, 2 months agoTake this or leave this, but for option 3 I’m personally interested in what our storefront space was before NUA was here and how that has mirrored changes on this block (for better or for worse)-what businesses were before NUA came, and maybe what the rest of the block was and the question of how we want urban spaces to
“develop”. What’s good/bad development? etc.
I worked with an installation artist Ernesto Pujol who deals with memory in his work and he wrote/said once (not an exact quote) “every object is guilty of a hidden meaning” which is a quote I love. What hidden meanings is our space “guilty” of?
What stories lurk prior to NUA’s birth (instead of BCE, BNUA?)?
Here’s Ernesto’s page
http://www.ernestopujol.org/
My friend’s cousin used to own the women’s clothing store that used to occupy the main NUA studio space. Wesminster street was very different back then. I brought him by NUA recently and he walked in and was amazed to see what the space had become.
| Posted 3 years, 2 months ago… I have to say….
I’m OBSESSED with all the possibilities behind the white electric idea..
theres SOOOOO much we could do with it.. its reaching out… but also something thats close to home… there probably isnt one person at new urban arts that hasn’t had a coffee or a bagel from WE at some point in their lives..
and in addition.. we don’t want to make the project too large.. we can make this big but not out of control… we have to remember we’re working with a limited amount of time..
yep my vote is white electric..
<3 xoxo Shannon
| Posted 3 years, 2 months agoHey folks,
I hate to burst your bubble, but the White Electric site was not an electrical store prior to it opening. The name comes from it’s original site — on Broadway — that was an electrical appliance store. The first owners brought the name with them when they moved to Westminster. I believe that there space — most of that block — was a used furniture store.
Pete
| Posted 3 years, 2 months ago