My 2nd installation, "Resurfaced", in Round 35 (in addition to my individual installation "Nostalgia For the Living") is part of Communograph, curated by Ashley Hunt. Since my residency at labotanica last summer, I'd spoken with Ashley about the progress of my work for "Uncharted" and how I could contribute part of it to Communograph. I set up a looping projection installation of photographs at the entrance of the "Communograph" house that I took of historic floors and foundations in the Third Ward.
via the Communograph website:
Communograph is a multi-platform art project, conceived and initiated by Ashley Hunt and organized in collaboration with residents of Houston’s Third Ward community, Project Row Houses, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, and students and faculty of the University of Houston’s School of Art.
Hunt was originally invited to make a map of the Third Ward neighborhood that surrounds Project Row Houses, and through initial conversations with community members and questions about what it means to make a map today, the project expanded into a framework for community-based research, featuring five parallel activities. The title, “Communograph,” was developed to combine “community” with “writing” so as to ground this research in a writing of community from the perspective of the community itself. In this way, each of the five research activities serves as a platform for community members to enter into conversation, sharing their thinking and authorship. The goal is to build local questions, knowledge, audience and interpretation for what will, in the end, become an atlas for community members and institutions.
FIVE RESEARCH PLATFORMS
Each platform acts as the initiation of research processes rather than a final outcome or “finished work” in the conventional sense, and each has been developed out of collective dialogues with the featured artists, members of the sponsoring organizations, and with residents of the Third Ward.
1.The Communograph House, an exhibition of research-based artworks by artists: Regina Agu, Lisa Harris, Journey Allen, Michael Khalil Taylor, Rebecca Novak, and Ifeanyi “Res” Okoro II; the exhibition is curated collaboratively, between the artists and the project’s organizers;
2.Mapping Community Through Creative Action is a series of public programs presented by the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts (MC) and offered in conjunction with Communograph, an original project by artist, Ashley Hunt, commissioned by Project Row Houses (PRH).This series is curated by Bree Edwards (MC) and Ashley Clemmer Hoffman (PRH);
3.Sidewalk Talks, a neighborhood conversation series taking place in front of the Communograph House twice a month, organized by the artists from the Communograph House and members of the surrounding community, which will be supported in part by students of J Hill’s IART class at the University of Houston;
4.A project of participatory mapping and story collection, open to contributions by community members and visitors to Project Row Houses, constructed by students of Cheryl Beckett’s Graphic Communication class at the University of Houston’s School of Art with support from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts;
5.An interactive website (this one), which archives information on the project and an the research that we gather along the way into a searchable database of community mapping for Third Ward, Houston, designed by the students of Beckham Dossett’s Graphic Communications class at the University of Houston’s School of Art.
Last year I began a series of work in which I experiment with alternatives to traditional mapmaking through image, movement, and sound. I seek to question the authoritative nature of mapmaking and historical assumptions about what content is important for maps, and to discover what is revealed when spaces are mapped from within.
For Communograph, I investigated the floors and foundations of historic and/or abandoned spaces in Third Ward and the immediate Project Row Houses surroundings. The resulting photos are projected onto the floor of the Communograph house, transforming the space into an architectural map that changes and shifts throughout the installation. I am interested in mapping the collective memories left behind in historic spaces and architecture, and I view floors as the universal access point and recorder of human interactions within a space. We all touch the floor, and we all leave traces behind.
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| Exposed foundation on corner of Dowling @ Elgin, Third Ward, Houston TX |
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| Floor in historic Eldorado Ballroom, Third Ward, Houston TX |
Communograph is a multi-platform art project, conceived and initiated by Ashley Hunt and organized in collaboration with residents of Houston’s Third Ward community, Project Row Houses, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, and students and faculty of the University of Houston’s School of Art.
Hunt was originally invited to make a map of the Third Ward neighborhood that surrounds Project Row Houses, and through initial conversations with community members and questions about what it means to make a map today, the project expanded into a framework for community-based research, featuring five parallel activities. The title, “Communograph,” was developed to combine “community” with “writing” so as to ground this research in a writing of community from the perspective of the community itself. In this way, each of the five research activities serves as a platform for community members to enter into conversation, sharing their thinking and authorship. The goal is to build local questions, knowledge, audience and interpretation for what will, in the end, become an atlas for community members and institutions.
FIVE RESEARCH PLATFORMS
Each platform acts as the initiation of research processes rather than a final outcome or “finished work” in the conventional sense, and each has been developed out of collective dialogues with the featured artists, members of the sponsoring organizations, and with residents of the Third Ward.
1.The Communograph House, an exhibition of research-based artworks by artists: Regina Agu, Lisa Harris, Journey Allen, Michael Khalil Taylor, Rebecca Novak, and Ifeanyi “Res” Okoro II; the exhibition is curated collaboratively, between the artists and the project’s organizers;
2.Mapping Community Through Creative Action is a series of public programs presented by the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts (MC) and offered in conjunction with Communograph, an original project by artist, Ashley Hunt, commissioned by Project Row Houses (PRH).This series is curated by Bree Edwards (MC) and Ashley Clemmer Hoffman (PRH);
3.Sidewalk Talks, a neighborhood conversation series taking place in front of the Communograph House twice a month, organized by the artists from the Communograph House and members of the surrounding community, which will be supported in part by students of J Hill’s IART class at the University of Houston;
4.A project of participatory mapping and story collection, open to contributions by community members and visitors to Project Row Houses, constructed by students of Cheryl Beckett’s Graphic Communication class at the University of Houston’s School of Art with support from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts;
5.An interactive website (this one), which archives information on the project and an the research that we gather along the way into a searchable database of community mapping for Third Ward, Houston, designed by the students of Beckham Dossett’s Graphic Communications class at the University of Houston’s School of Art.
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