shelflife by visitor

Things sometimes sprout mysteriously at the whim of serendipity, dissolving just as fast. Others seem they’ve always been. Tectonic. True. These collaborations each peppered a path borne perhaps, of both of these possibilities.

The thing about paths is that nobody reflects fondly on those strung efficiently between two points. We’re sculpted by our travels across the tines of gnarled and broken forks.

When we slide dusty into the bellies of ravines or catch a ghosted glimpse of the undeniable traces of a bramble’s lipstick upon us–puffy pink ribbons of flesh draping limbs in unreasonable ways–we’re reminded we’ve wandered well.

We’ll recall these travels and remember the breadcrumbs scattered to allow us our return when the urge to claw our way back percolates up thru whatever fog it is that convinces us Back can’t afford us the mantle of progression to a fresher Forward.

A day after tumbling from a very concrete path, both of my arms essentially broken, I met Sarah Lipstate. Slings and braces damned, her music inspired me to pick my camera up and begin making art again. Her work continued offering unexpected forms of healing and her friendship’s been a catalyst in my continued growth as both a maker and a be-er.

Beyond the physical work below are the concepts, song and album titles, compositional rearrangements, debates, psychic healing and loose-ends we’ve shared–aether that weathers a path in ways far less photogenic than material work borne along the way. I could paint it all in pigment of poetry and prose, but such scribbling somehow only transmutes the sacred profane. In an annual rite of reflection here’s a little bit of what I’ve made with Noveller.

Ends by Noveller from visitor design on Vimeo.

NOVELLER LIVE AT PS1 from visitor design on Vimeo.

RANALDO/LIPSTATE LIVE AT ROULETTE NYC from visitor design on Vimeo.

THE HEART’S A WILD WIND : Study for an Unfinished Film from visitor design on Vimeo.

Noveller, “Almost Alright” from Impose on Vimeo.

NOVELLER – BIRDS WITH BEARDS – LIVE – THE CAVERN, DALLAS TX from visitor design on Vimeo.

2007 statistics on global human trafficking state that in the neighborhood of 1.2 million people are sold into slavery annually. That was up from around 800,000 in 2005 by Department of Justice accounting. I’m guessing that close to 2 million people will have been sold into slavery this year alone by the time January rolls around. So, every minute, nearly 4 people are disappeared as commodities. 95% of them are sexually abused. 70% are female. 50% are children. Almost all are under 21 years of age and most are at least marginally educated.

THEY GROW UP FAST is several thousand volts of flickering testimony to the brutal efficiency with which human traffickers grind lives into ruin. STUDENT #1 / GIRL is the first of two editioned visitordesign works addressing contemporary slavery. Manufactured by LiteBrite in Brooklyn from visitordesign drawings, THEY GROW UP FAST is a component of a larger conceptual visitordesign project in progress.

Additional info on They Grow Up Fast here

Dimensions are around 80″ x 24″ x 30″.
3-stage neon sculpture on child’s school desk. Edition of 4 plus artist prototype.
Price available by request. The GIF below is animated
(depending on your browser, you may need to wait around 30 seconds for the animation to begin cycling).

SkipBox is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever made. It’s a 5-channel video / 10-channel audio project and sculpture. I designed and fabricated a console, mixing/recording apparatus for it and shot hours of footage of myself skipping rope around large pieces of public art and temporary pieces of street construction.

I had microphones in my shoes and on my collar. One would pick up the percussive rhythms of the different surfaces I skipped on while the other recorded my breathing, little mantras I’d repeat or vocalizations I’d make. These would then each be routed to mixers that people interacting with the sculpture could manipulate. Additionally, I had built a little recording deck into the SkipBox console surface–so, blank cassettes could be purchased from the gallery to record mixes of the work as they were generated by visitors.

Each of the 5 channels of video has its own, independent set of video clips–and no two clips are of a matching duration. Each clip is as long as it had to be to skip full-circle around whatever was being skipped around. Each channel is also looped, so the image/sound structure is perpetually randomized.

I still have a small edition of different tapes that I made with the machine available. I’ll add them to the store one of these days. Each tape is signed and numbered. The artwork is inked sneaker and jumprope on paper.

The sculpture and a tiny collection of the vids are below. Sadly, the quicktime lacks the audio distortion that the amp in the sculpture provides. Sadlier, the clips are also microscopic, so you lose a lot of the sense of scale and setting that make all of the featured skipjects so beautiful.