TWO GRANTS AWARDED

The New York Council On The Arts Awards TWO GRANTS To Directly FUND SCULPTURE SPACE RESIDENTS

Sculpture Space & The New York Council on the Arts (NYSCA) believing that the individual artists showcase the power of the individual by enabling them to successfully realize their unique visions, have partnered to support two 2023 Sculpture Space artist residents.

NYSCA and Sculpture Space Inc. supports the creation of new work by New York State artists through artist-initiated projects across a wide range of areas. Artists at any career stage were welcome to apply. And although all 2023 Sculpture Space Residents are of the highest caliber these two partnerships were developed in part based on New York Residencies and visionary focus of the artists projects. Each Artist will be awarded $10,000.

This application to NYSCA by an individual artist was sponsored by Sculpture Space. These grants are awarded to Sculpture Space and then directed to the individual artist.

Project Title: BURDEN OF CONQUEST

is a series of linked Augmented Reality sculptures comprising an interactive game set in public space, meant to be played alone or in groups by children and adults, which involves real-world exploration, philosophical contemplation, and questions the ideologies of ownership, capitalism and colonialism. Inspired in part by Italo Calvino’s poetic masterpiece, Invisible Cites, the cult-hit film Midnight Special, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Ode; inscribed to William H. Channing, these sculptures will take the form of “invisible architecture,” accessible through QR codes strategically placed throughout the communities that will host the work. Each QR code offers a portal to a different “city,”which reveals itself through exploration using an AR-capable interface. As one approaches the city’s walls, the structure “materializes” around the viewer, and functions as a puzzle that yields its prize upon solving: the code to that city’s sculptural “heart:” a digital file that may be printed on a publicly-available 3D printer if the viewer so chooses. As the viewer moves away from the city, the structure slowly melts into thin air, as if cloaked in invisibility. (Please view the work-in-progress video to see this in acton, as well as the QR codes you may use to experience the AR versions of the work on your iPhone or iPad — Android platform capability is still in beta) Each sculpture is a part of a larger interlocking puzzle that reveals itself when all the pieces (eleven cities in total) are printed and assembled. Upon completion, the resulting work will function as a small memento of their “conquest,” and be certified by the artist as authentic and complete, with a signed certificate of authenticity contingent upon a somewhat tongue-in-cheek agreement to bear the burden of caring for their “conquests” for the duration of their lives.

Project Title: I HOPE THIS HELPS

is a sculptural engagement with poetry where image, text, and sound become one when audiovisual experience is met with the participant’s body. With this work I interrogate – and hopefully obliterate – access barriers to poetry and challenge linguistic and literary hierarchies of form to create and deliver an embodied, tactile, moving experience of the poetic breath. As in traditional poetry, language creates image. As in traditional visual arts practices, image and material communicate as language. As in performance, the body and its engaged movement through sound and space is required to complete the experience. The sonic elements of this large installation piece will work with the printed materials and the space itself—with its breezes and industrial clangs—and the breathing, moving bodies of participants to create an assonance which completes the communicative circle of language. When participants enter the space they will likely first notice the softly lilting cloth hung at intervals which invite the body to move through and around the pieces as they choose and are able. Rather than building meaning sequentially, each image/text brings to mind Raymond Queneau’s “100,000 Thousand Billion Sonnets” where each sequential mapping of the work creates a new poem which is unique to each individual participant. The poem is then made new again and again with each sequential engagement of the work. Shortly after noticing the visual layout of material in space, participants may notice the soft, dual hum of water and spoken language. Set at a level just above white noise will be my own recorded voice in concert with the sounds of falling water. I have been collecting sounds and images (moving and still) of water fountains and waterfalls from around the world for this piece. Stations for hydration (water jugs with tiny cups) will be placed around the piece for participants to drink. These final two dual life-giving elements—water and fire, as experienced through the projected light of fountain imagery which will be barely detectable beneath the light of the sun— the first two elements, represented through the natural materials of each printed piece and the movement of air and breath, to recreate the poem as a space of liberation, challenge, understanding, conversation, and life.