Ghettomorphosis / Closeup of interactive sand-box with Cherokee street ingredients

Galen Gondolfi asked Sarah Paulsen and I to collaborate on a show during Beverlyear – his year of inviting all female artists/curators to program Fort Gondo’s shows.  We leaped off from the word, Bricaleur ~

A term introduced by Lévi-Strauss (1962), describing a type of thinking and symbolization; the opposite of “engineer”. The engineer creates specialized tools for specialized purposes. The bricoleur is a “jack-of-all-trades”, who uses few, non-specialized tools for a wide variety of purposes. There is a loose connection between, on the one hand, the bricoleur and “primitive” societies, and, on the other, the engineer and modern societies (see evolutionism). For Lévi-Strauss, the two concepts are the point of departure for a complex theoretical discussion of “the science of the concrete” in premodern, “primitive” cultures.

Our project included a formal gallery show as well as a participatory series of events including a month-long quilting bee, a New Moon Women’s Circle, a movie night of short films, and a music show.  Here/s what I wrote for the catalogue:

“On Bricaleur-ing / The spirit that popped into my head when Sarah and I stumbled upon the word Bricaleur-ing was a magic lady dressed only in fishnets and a brick-painted cardboard box singing “She’s a Brick House” while dancing around* downtown.  A laughing, intuitive, spritely and simple force that judges no one, dips and glides between sore ‘mores’ and ‘who does she think she is?” – Free to be….  I hear the fine art stats as reported by the Guerilla Girls, and go in trends of avoiding galleries and museums as a result of the intermittent feeling of boredom/ego/cynicism/fatalism that can predominate imbalanced masculine work.  This invitation to curate as part of Beverlyear was a great little gauntlet: Go ahead and be that – instead of bitching about ladies largely seeming cut off from power-play in the mainstream art culture, or a feminine/nurture aspect being absent from ‘high art’,  why not enjoy playing around…. Stop focusing on what’s not and create what Is. The work culled as a result of the concept embodies unique sensibilities of lady-makers, and I really enjoy the conversations happening within various ‘clusters’ of pieces. I anticipate soulful connections as we transform the gallery space and spill into the neighborhood thru the end of the month

Ghettomorphosis: come as a child / My piece sprang into being when we hung the show and I felt the space.  I’m typically drawn to the eyesore wall that looks like it needs some TLC – collaborating with distractions and including the cute fixture faces.   This is an elaboration on a project I did with my kindergarden artists at the Saint Louis Language Immersion school —    exploring materials and building worlds to collaborate within.  These movable/symbolic bits were also a way I played with visioning the Cherokee Community Hub public plaza concept when the Hub was still a funded, formal project notion …. Very low-fi, Jungian sand-therapy sort of landscape architecture — the energetic lay of the land and the beings who shift it.  For the past two years my creative energy has largely been poured into community projects on Cherokee and in CAMP (The Community Arts and Media Project) – I am interested in how “available means” like song, color, friendliness, invitation, and compassion are creative gestures in the particular climate of the neighborhood.  In creative action I love to return to participatory, playful honesty I witness all the time in children I am lucky to work with.  This inter-actable mini=universe is both a celebration of the ideas and dreams generated by local relationships,  and a turning again toward allowing my own studio play and writing to be where I ground the conversation to root deeper.”

*Incidentally – you may have seen this lady in the Peoples JOy 2010 — Queen Bee read this description and proceeded to blow my imagination out of the water! She rocked the cardboard.