KIAC Artist Residency

I’ve just received great news that I was accepted to the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture for a 5 week residency in the fall of 2011. I will share the 1901 house rumored to be haunted with another artist. More details all around to come!

Below is the bulk of my application.

Will I hold true to it in One Year’s time? Only time will tell!

I would like to come to Dawson City to make an experimental book about isolated &
imaginary communities, exploration, camps, temporary settlements, nomadic life, natural
resource subsistence, and scavenging. The book will be made using a mix of photography,
collage, drawing, and text. The format will be large and have many foldout pages meant to
emulate territory and exploration. Think constantly unfolding newspaper in many
dimensions. It’s initial intent is to be a singular, although the reproduction after, or at the
end of the residency, will be a priority for exhibition possibility. It will be a research based
fictional narrative. Since so much of my recent work relies on the computer I would like to
make my residency a back-to-analog project. This doesn’t negate digital material, but instead
puts a primary focus on the handmade, using drawing materials, scissors and glue, found
imagery, typewriter, etc…

Much of my visual work centers around nostalgia, beauty in awkwardness, texture,
the human form, positive/negative space, found imagery, appropriation, and thievery. Most
of my writing, in both prose and poetry, is about exploration, weird jobs, waste, scavenging,
heroship/failure, and often times reads from an imagined future. Finding symbiosis in text
and image makes book works my ideal form.

In the first week I would like to acclimatize to the city, taking walks and shooting
photographs, making small notes and starting to build narratives from fragments. Parts of
my investigation are informal interviews, eavesdropping, and overheard stories. I’d like to
speak with residents of Dawson to get a sense of why and for what purpose they are there.
From this I can derive the kernels necessary to start building a research-based, thematic
narrative. The story won’t necessarily be directly about Dawson, but will use the city and its
inhabitants, geographies, and texture to create the architecture of a new and imagined
community. By the end of the first month I would like to be well into the story, sorting
various characters and narratives, deriving text from image and vice versa. By the end of the
second month I would like to have the book completed. I am compulsively productive, so I
expect the work to be well developed and substantial.

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