This week artist Sarah Weinstock joined me for a day-trip from Columbus to Yellow Springs. We first made a pit-stop at Young's Jersey Dairy for samples of fresh cheddar cheese curds and kid-size milkshakes. We landed at the Nonstop Liberal Art Institute, browsed the library of salvaged books, all meticulously indexed, then made our way to the corner of Dayton and Walnut to visit the telephone booth project initiated by artist and Yellow Springs resident Migiwa Orimo.
Orimo generously invites other artists to create site-specific works at the booth, resulting in 8 to 12 projects from Oct. 2009 to Sept. 2010. My activity during this residency coincides with an audio project for the telephone booth, incorporating collaborative audio recordings with my grandmother, Ora Lee Carr.
Here is a drawing of the phone booth from one of the tables at the Corner Cone Dairy Bar & Grill & Bike Rental.
The act of drawing is contextual to the place and process involved. Another person enters and exits the booth during the process. The drawing is informed from direct interaction with the particular site producing a real-time artifact and ongoing connection with the world. The materiality of water, pigment and paper in the case of watercolor allows for rapid and spontaneous responses.
Next, Sarah and I visited Starflower Natural Foods, an excellent place to shop, take in therapeutic aromas from sample bottles of essential oils and bump into people such as artist Nevin Mercede. We then proceeded to the Village Herb Shoppe -- thank you Owa rock-of-ages for sharing the organic bee pollen, propolis royal jelly and your own wild oregano oil extract!
Walking the bike path along the edge of Glen Helen, we soon reached the hushed grounds of Antioch College. We ate tasty crabapples that had fallen from a tree in the middle of the campus -- my colleague Herb would call these apples a "ground score!"
Check out Antioch's art building...
Near the art building we found an entrance to a path leading us into a mysterious wooded area.
This is Sarah's drawing made from things picked up off the ground.
In the picture below I imagine the wild vegetation shaping its own improvised educational landscape...
If you look closely, you can see the bottom of a platform in the trees.
Climbing a rusty ladder to this platform was worthwhile, a great spot for elevated meditation and painting. We agreed with a local squirrel to eat only the mulberries we could reach, then the squirrel began showing off by dancing upside down on a twig. Lots of empty beer litter in the area -- signs of raccoons?
Back on the ground this sign marks the area as a nursery for trees.
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Looking forward to tomorrow evening's open house!
-Ryan, 7/16/2010
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