Artist-In-
Residence Recap: and we all came
in together

In October, CFW announced the inaugural Artist-in-Residence, Rebecca Locke, and commissioned Rebecca to create a new piece of work exploring the theme of celebration. The resulting body of workand we all came in together, an immersive installation, utilized new digital media, analogue technologies, video, objects, found images and discovered stories to reflect New Yorkers’ ongoing relationship with the city, exploring celebration as memory and its meaning defined through the interaction of people. With the artist’s appropriation of micro-text printing (commonly seen as a security feature on twenty dollar bills), the core component was a microscope-based installation with twelve microtext stories and projections, with the work vying between scale and perspective. The piece proved aesthetically and visually stimulating, through the colors of the microprinted stories projected on the gallery walls, the photographic prints made through the microscopes optical viewer blowing up the scale of text and print elements, the found photographs and the experimental video that filled the gallery walls with a mesmerizing loop of a flame as it filled a balloon, ready for release. But, besides the visual element, the work pivoted on the artist’s written text and how that text was perceived. In this case, text was perceived through the miniscule and discarded, from the forgotten pockets of the world. This aesthetic axis ignited Locke’s most penetrating hypothesis: perception ascribes value. At it’s core, Locke’s and we all came in together is a city-centric practice in seeing the unseen. Recently, CFW rehashed the making of the work and this is what she said.

Where did the idea for the commissioned work ‘and we all came in together’ come from?
Following Hurricane Sandy, Dimas Salaberrios, a Redeemer pastor from the Bronx, would take an old school van every day from the South Bronx to Far Rockaway bringing young men who’d pump the basements of anyone who needed help. I went along with Dimas and Christina Stanton (Redeemer Missions) and someone asked me to check on their neighbor. We came across a dear 96-year-old lady whose home had flooded, but she didn’t want to leave for fear of being looted. In this time of distress she wanted to tell her stories and show photographs from her album. I was struck by how many of her memories, her most meaningful memories, revolved around celebration, and of course that meant the people she had made those memories with. When CFW commissioned the work on the theme of celebration I thought of her and of what she’d shared with me. In thinking of celebration as memory, I invited New Yorkers’, particularly New Yorkers’ who had known the city for a long time, to tell their stories of celebration, relating to their lives and to the city. It was these stories—these discovered stories—that would form the basis of the piece. It is a very ‘New York City’ piece of work.

A very ‘New York City‘ piece…
It is inspired by memories collected from New Yorkers who have known the city for five decades or more, memories that I then distilled into twelve New York City stories. These are very small, very short stories, no more than a stanza long, the longest is a hundred and sixty words. These stories include traveling from New York for The March on Washington, the spontaneous Times Square celebration on VE day as news travelled across Manhattan that war in Europe was over, of going AWOL to visit loved ones in Brooklyn, the accolade of an ‘untouchable’, and the story of an old lady forever mistaken for ‘Katherine Hepburn on a bike’. Through these memories the commissioned work explores themes of migration, celebrity, tradition, the communal element of this city, and especially the city as a place of sanctuary.

The exhibition is described as an immersive installation; what is that?
As an immersive installation, the exhibition aimed to be a bit adventurous, to transform the gallery space, centered around an interactive component. The core of the piece was a microtext installation, with a stainless steel lab table staged as a Science Lab, set-up with a gem microscope and a series of twelve glass microscope slides on which the twelve New York stories were printed in microtext. The stories could only be read under the analogue microscope, in turn fitted with a digital camera that was used to send the live feed from the microscope’s field of view to both an iPad and a large scale projection on the gallery wall, so the stories could be read by all. People visiting the gallery space could switch out the glass microscope slides to read the stories.

The work incorporates microtext technology; can you explain?
In looking into the idea of ‘the hidden’, of the quiet, through the metaphor of the small print, I found information about the old microfiche process, but then discovered the back of a twenty dollar bill incorporates microprinting. The shading around the word ‘twenty’ on the bill isn’t shading at all, rather it is legible microtext and numbers that can be read under magnification. The technology to print such small text on paper is new in commercial printing, and offered as an anti-counterfeiting feature to clients who want to be able to authenticate products such as tickets.

So is the idea of discovery significant?
In my mind the work was about finding the hidden and unexpected. There is something to the work about scale and perspective, about finding the small and finding the forgotten. The installation was designed to reflect the process that, as the artist, I encountered in making the work—the process of finding something, of finding the stories, and finding the people that told them. With respect to this, the installation also included a ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ element. Around the gallery space, applied low—below the sight line—the walls were dotted with small color printed microtext stories. It was an element of the installation that once you found it and saw it, it became obvious: you would see it everywhere. The viewers who came to the gallery and discovered the dots were give a mounted blank glass microscope slide and invited take a story from the wall for their blank slide—a small piece of artwork to keep.

But saying this, that is just what the work was about in my mind as I was bringing its elements together. Art, I believe, should be reflective which is more than saying not all its meaning should be spelled out, or that space should be left for interpretation. As a reflective piece the installation, the stories (and even the process of finding them) will mean different things to different people, and that is my hope. I am sure that this work will mean things to people that I couldn’t have imagined, and as the artist, hearing these things, these interpretations, means a great deal.

 

Twitter:
@b_Locke