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J U L i A G A N G K i N , i VA N A D E L S O N + M i S H AY L A B i N K E R D
Both of these projects dealt with implementing art and installations in a public space. While they were for two different courses, they both took place in the “Painted Alley” of downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. DiSPLACED DOMESTiCiTY was an installation done for an Art + Environment course (aka: Guerilla Art to all its students). The course focused on Street Art Culture, as well as, debating social and political issues of public art. Soon we became our own street artists - wheat pasting, tagging, and creating the unexpected through the streets of Ann Arbor. Apart from curating the unusual blip amongst the everyday, I was also interested in inverting private + public space. The social norms it plays upon and the question of what is public space or whether all of our “public” space has become privatized, were concepts intriguing to both of us on this project. We found free furniture that we painted all white to monumentalize the private realm of our lives now put on display in the public as “art”. Its starkness popped against the busy graffitied background of the alley. The few props (a remote, pillow, rug, blanket and 2 books) we left untouched, playing between a sterile exhibit and livable space while also hoping to encourage passersby to interact with the installation or even graffiti artists to work with the new blank canvas. EYES was a final project done for a video installation course. We filmed several different individuals’ facial expressions, focusing on only their eyes. Intrigued with the pscyhological notions of surveillance, we wanted to experiement with how eyes watching the viewer could evoke an entirely different ambience in the space.The projection was skewed so that a pair of eyes could show up on two disjointed walls in the alley. This way people on the sidewalk would see the one eye facing directly at them. Once the viewer was in the space, both eyes would be watching them.