So this is not my first post about how I love encountering art out in the real world. be they chalk tracings of night shadows, zippers inserted into sidewalk cracks, "War" spraypainted under the "stop" on a stopsign, or signage on a subway telling you "do not fall in love" instead of "do not lean on doors". I delight in buskers and street music of most kinds. So its no wonder I loved the movie about/by? controversial/loved/mysterious British street artist Banksy. Entitled "Exit through the gift shop", the film is guessed to be the artists' own pseudo documentary turning the lens towards the art market's effect on art making and art makers. I saw it recently, long after it came out, and for me it was a kick in the pants to finish a project I started in November.
Really the inception of this field of study goes back to 2009 when I returned to Rhode Island, and started meeting with childhood friends and collaborators Alvin G. and Sam Coren. Between the three of us are writers, historians, visual artists, musicians, producers, thinkers and mystics. We wanted to do what we began calling a Deep Map of Providence. Looking at the city we loved as if looking at a living being with chakra centers, energy blocks, wounds and other stored memories. The site of a collective and personal history. We wanted to find a way - in various mediums- to explore and begin telling this history. We wrote essays and poetry and may texts that fall in between. We read histories, visited sites, and walked the streets with eyes wide open, alert to the feeling of a place. There was this idea that certain areas were places where pedestrians intuitively did not go. A sense that the highway was strangling the city and that these spots were either energy leaks, where essential life force seeped out of the city, or were energy knots where things got stuck and had no where to go. We weren't talking about traffic patterns necessarily, although they played a role in things of course. But we were observing the less visible ENERGETIC realities of certain spaces throughout the city.
We excitedly monitored the DOT website for signs of progress in the 195 highway relocation. We watched the tent cities under those bridges in fox point and the jewelery district spring up, thrive—if that can be said—and get evicted from their makeshift homes. One day in November I realized that the highway ought to have words on it. The idea of writing on the landscape has always appealed to me. My first installation had writing across a long horizontal wall and over the weeks I took to cover it, I often returned to the concept of the horizon, the line created by sky meeting land as far away as your eye can take you. To limit and to dream. We live on that line, in the thin between where the body of the earth ends and the endless space of heavens begin.
I remember New York city in the early nineties. During the 42nd street revitalization project they kicked the xxx theaters and smut out of the west side of 42nd street, between hell's kitchen and times square. When the theaters were being renovated and were tenantless, all the marquees were filled with haiku by local poets. I was so moved by the stillness of their words in the bustling city. The moment of contemplation, handed to me and every passerby like a communion wafer. In November of this year, I had just finished lettering signs for Greenwich Village's Halloween parade with Kingston artist Robert The. I decided that the highway needed some words—not any words, but some words. I wanted to start quietly, the way one might begin a conversation with a complete stranger. With curiosity. Listening as much as speaking. I called Sam. Sure enough, he had notebooks with words conceived under that bridge. I consulted another friend about typeface design. This picture is the first image of our first piece in what we hope will be a long series, or a continued conversation. I have all sorts of thoughts on these words, and would love to write about them, but more on that later. We hope to have a fruitful talk.
