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Why Make Art? : Interview with Carron Little

2/15/2014

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For my interview project with Borderbend, I set out to explore some of the unanswerable questions that have been squirming to escape my mind, and fired them on Chicago artists in search of some marinated wisdom. I ask why art is important in communities, why humans value art, why artists care, and what makes art art. All of their words have helped me on my path as an art student, and a person making sense of this world. Their challenges to survive in the art world of Chicago are inspiring yet devastating, their passions are strong, and their work is meaningful and genuine. Enjoy, and keep your eyes open for any of their upcoming work. Thanks for reading.
- Hannah Brookman

Carron Little

Picture
Why Make Art?

For change.

“When I was a young, I was very political and did a lot of direct action. At the age of sixteen I became a representative for youth CND in Yorkshire and Humberside, in the north of England. I had a big group of fifty young people. One of the first public performances I did was to organize all of these young people and to go to every main station in each major city in Yorkshire and Humberside, and we staged a nuclear fallout in the stations, so suddenly fifty people would drop to the floor, and people would come with theses radiation bins.”

Carron is now using performance to bring awareness to the Chicago public. Her most recent performance took place at Bridgeview Bank for Open House Chicago in October. It was called Unto Each Their Own Safe, and was conducted by Little’s extravagant alter ego, The Queen of Luxuria. “The philosophy of the Queen is to challenge the notions of patriarchal power, hence the celebration of the diamond dust breast plates, I call them gender plates.” On this special day, the Queen, and her lovely assistants were posted up at the bank to play games with the public. “I created this interactive performance where the public went up to these three different stations and either play chess or there was this game, Octagon, based on one of Duchamp’s games, and I created a Jenga/Queen of Luxuria style stacking game.” There was a fourth game, which the Queen herself administered. In this game, the participants would move around ‘gender plates’ and discuss their finances and earnings with the Queen of Luxuria.

“If a person was earning $30,000, according to the Queen of Luxuria, the minimum wage should be $80,000, so I would make up the difference. If a woman was sat in front of me I calculated her working life and multiplied that by the money she hadn’t been paid over her lifetime. One woman earned to $30-60,000 bracket. She was unhappy at work so I gave her an extra $80,000 so she could take the year off and find a job that she really wanted to do. And she was happy in life. If somebody was unhappy in life I would give them an extra $20,00 so they could take a holiday or go to the spa every once in a while. People that were retired were getting over a million dollars which wasn’t what I was expecting how much women would get. It really is a profound statement on the inequality of our lives.”


“We as a society still have a long way to go in terms of creating peace and equality in the world and 40% of countries are still in a state of war. I often think about how women are treated all over the world, and our quality of lives and even in the western world, it went up since last year, it was 73 cents to the dollar and now its 77 to the dollar. I’ve been in positions where I’ve had greater qualifications starting out a job but was still paid less than my colleague that had less educational qualifications.”

“Every time I lose hope or contemplate giving up, which I don’t, I refuse to, I just look at the statistics of how many women have had solo shows in museums or how many are represented by commercial galleries. Even a gallery that I show at, I invited the director over for a studio visit and I asked him ‘how many women have you represented in your gallery over the year?’ And the next year he made a point to show one female artist for every male artist, and just by having that conversation I made him aware , its such a prevalent problem.


“The next big project that I’m starting to work on is ‘The City Alive With Dreams’. From 2012 to 2013 I interviewed one person a week about their dreams and then I wrote poems about their dreams and invited them to select their favorite line. One person I interviewed selected, “the sacred key of ecstasy and orgasmic health opened the door to everything that is a part of me” the poetry really documents the extremes of human experiences as a story or a reflection of the interview. I'm really excited to put those ideas into public space. I’m inviting all of the people who have participated to a meeting to discuss how they would like their stories placed in a public space, but I’m also thinking, how am I going to make it interactive so that theres lots of different things to think about. It’s really part of my artistic practice to create these interactive performance; it’s part of my feminist aesthetic. I think it’s a really critical part of womens practice and the way in which we all parade in the world.” 

Apart from creating her own pieces, Carron also runs Out of Sight, a public performance festival in its’ fourth year, and growing. Carron also teaches art in city schools and is looking forward to a new teaching position in the SAIC performance art department. She currently has a piece opening at Fluxus in Minneapolis, is finishing The City Alive With Dreams, and is drawing all the time. 


“The rhesus monkeys are the closest monkeys to us, but anthropologists have studied their behavior and said that they have greater empathy and community towards each other than humans display towards each other and my hope is that humans will become more intelligent through culture, and be able to figure out more peaceful ways. Through culture, my hope is that we will eliminate war and eliminate violence. We still have a way to go, and it won't happen in my lifetime but hopefully I can be a part of the train of change” 
 -- Carron Little

Find out more about Carron Little by visiting her website at carronlittle.com.  

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Why Is Art Important? : Interview with Lindsay Obermeyer

2/11/2014

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For my interview project with Borderbend, I set out to explore some of the unanswerable questions that have been squirming to escape my mind, and fired them on Chicago artists in search of some marinated wisdom. I ask why art is important in communities, why humans value art, why artists care, and what makes art art. All of their words have helped me on my path as an art student, and a person making sense of this world. Their challenges to survive in the art world of Chicago are inspiring yet devastating, their passions are strong, and their work is meaningful and genuine. Enjoy, and keep your eyes open for any of their upcoming work. Thanks for reading
- Hannah Brookman

Lindsay Obermeyer

Picture


Photo by Samantha Bennett


Why is art important?

“I’m interested in seeing how the arts can reach out to communities that don't generally think of themselves as having access to the arts. I work in the community to create art as a way of trying to connect people together. Because often people don't talk to each other, the work that I do tends to break the ice. With The Red Thread Project, I physically connected them together.”

Lindsay Obermeyer is a textile artist, currently living in St. Louis, Missouri. Her interest in textiles has brought her down many paths. She has published knitting patterns, sewn dance costumes, owned a yarn store, produced ‘craft as fine art’, and most notably, founded The Red Thread Project, a community based performance piece. The project started as a dare from a colleague to connect a university to a town. “I physically connected them together,” said Obermeyer. She hand-knit dozens of hats, and linked them with a knit cord then invited the public to wear them. The closeness and absurdity created by the situation fostered more than simply physical connection; as the troop of hat-bearers paraded through the town, they also created friendships. Obermeyer did the performance multiple times then brought the hats to a homeless shelter to teach the men to sew, before they disconnected the hats and got to keep them. 


“It kept growing. It was affective for a lot of people especially for kids, it was about character education, less about art. Because even trained art educators didn’t get what I was teaching about art. They didn’t understand that yarn is a pliable line, that when knitted creates a shape, that when bent creates form of mass that then can be worn, and it has color and texture. Basic elements of art here! But because they're trying to think of art as painting and drawing and sculpture, and textiles and craft, they couldn't make the connection. So I often came in as a character educator, teaching kids about their community; that even though they're in 4th grade, they have a voice and a connection to everybody around them and that they better darn well start paying attention.”



Though Lindsay has now retired The Red Thread Project, she has not stopped bringing her art into the community. She was recently commissioned by the chamber of commerce of St. Louis to do a performance piece to bring attention to an unpopular neighborhood. “We would roll out astro turf, and sit and knit in the parking space. It was a neighborhood that had a lot of gang activity, and here we were benignly knitting. So it was a political statement; like, ‘you know what, we can have this shit go around us, but were just going to knit.’ We had a lot of kids involved. It was a way of driving interest to a blighted area. I was using the arts to make a neighborhood more palatable. And I got paid to do that!”

Lindsay was paid to create an enjoyable atmosphere in a neighborhood. This is because, “economically, art is a machine,” she explains. “Not that it trickles down to the artists often, but it does drive commerce.” Obermeyer gave me numerous examples of ways cities thrive through art. Paris is her favorite example, but she also recognizes the influence of the arts on Chicago. “When people talk about Chicago, they talk about the Bears and the Cubs, but they also talk about the Art Institute and the Sears tower. And thats art.” She mentioned St. Louis’ efforts to establish a larger arts community, as well as Paducah, Kentucky’s new flourishing art scene. Obermeyer sees that as art becomes more accessible, more people are attracted, and the economy grows.

Lindsay has created a successful career as an artist. As she likes to say, she manages herself as a business, and makes sure she gets paid for her work. She is currently knitting almost 600 skeins of yarn for a 12 x 26 knit bomb piece for the Motorola offices, and will be presenting a paper on the relationship between textile arts and the medical arts at a textile conference in Nebraska at the Textile Society.

“It’s not that hard. It just takes tenacity and a willingness to let go of preconceived notions of high art and low art, and fine art and fine craft, and just make.” - Lindsay Obermeyer

To see more of Lindsay Obermeyer's work, visit her site at
 http://www.lbostudio.com/





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Ars in Natura, Urbs in Horto

10/10/2013

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Saturday, October 12 (noon-2 p.m.)

Grant Theater
3850 Grant St.
Gary, IN  46409

suggested donation

Artists, environmentalists, urban gardeners, activists & others in the community gather at the Grant Theater to celebrate and explore connections between nature, the arts, and urbanism.  "Ars in Natura, Urbs in Horto" is the final Eighth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival event. 
"Ars in Natura, Urbs in Horto" includes:
  • community discussion about the arts, activism, nature and urbanism -- with Kay Abraham, Walter Nelson Jones, Sandra Rodriguez, Corey Hagelberg, Lisa LaMarre, Sam Barnett, and James Cornish. We will focus on questions such as:  What are some key features that define your practice? How have you drawn inspiration from your environment? What are some plans that you have, as you continue developing your practice?
  • discussion about WTF2013 contributions
  • performance by the Great Lakes Ensemble
Click on the link below to listen to the audio from our community discussion about the arts, nature, activism and urbanism: 
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"Excavating Arts & Activism in Illinois & Wisconsin" at Mess Hall

5/7/2012

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"Excavating Arts & Activism in Illinois & Wisconsin"

 Sunday, May 13, 2012 (7:00-9:00 p.m.)

Mess Hall
6932 N. Glenwood Ave. 
Chicago, IL  60626 


free and open to the public 
Picture
"Vote Walker Out" -- Overpass Light Brigade
You are invited to participate in "Excavating Arts & Activism in Illinois and Wisconsin" at Mess Hall – co-presented by Mess Hall and Borderbend Arts Collective. This discussion focuses on examples and problems from neighboring states in creative activism. There will also be a potluck; you're invited to join us during the potluck, and to bring something to eat or drink if you’d like. 

We'll discuss and compare the use of art strategies for grassroots political messaging and organizing, from within the Wisconsin Uprising to the work around closing prisons and opposing torture, fighting the mayoral austerity agendas, and organizing against the NATO summit in Illinois. We will look at tactics of visibility, of physical witness, of community coherence and of purposeful play. The focus will be on applicable strategies contextualized within artist and activist practice, and how strategies applicable in one state or city context might or might not be transferable to another. We will also explore the role of imagination, creative practice and the arts in building social movements. The participants include Alice Kim, Lane Hall, Yasmin Nair, Dan S. Wang and Dan Godston.  

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    Borderbend Blog

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