Saturday: Props Production @ Presentations
This Saturday, May 12 we’re hosting props production hours from 2pm – 6pm at Exit Art. We’ve built our production studio inside the gallery, and will be making sleeping bag socks for sidewalk occupations. They are waterproof and breathable “socks” that slide over sleeping bags, with stenciled lettering that says Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99%. The aim is to make our sleeping occupations more legible as collective protest. Please feel free to come join, get your hands dirty, make stuff!
Earlier in the day from 12-2pm there will be a couple of presentations pertaining to anonymous interventions on public/private space, one with artist John Hawke and the other with Daniel Latorre from Occupy Town Square.
Occupied Real Estate is part of Collective/Performative, the final exhibition of Exit Art’s influential 30 years as a non-profit gallery and cultural center. Don’t miss it!
John Hawke’s work began in on-site landscape painting practice. The performative nature of the artist in public space and the insufficiency of an optical approach in representing the landscape led to a practice that instead sees landscape as a snarled network of vectors of interest with the artist having an special capability in rupturing existing spatial conditions.
Using the principle of productive confusion developed through the collaborative platform Orange Work, for the past seven years he has made architecture and sign interventions into urban environments as well as maintaining a studio practice in painting attempting to create pictorial metaphors for the restriction and partition of public spaces.
Hawke studied classics in college, and went to Pratt for graduate school in 2002, writing his art history Master’s thesis on Robert Smithson’s anti-environmentalism. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006, and is currently a resident in the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts: Art and Law Residency Program. His work has been widely exhibited, presented and reviewed.
Self Organizing in The Commons
with Occupy Town Square collaborator Daniel Latorre
In the U.S. public space, the commons, has been increasingly encapsulated by entities and ideas of privatization. At the same time social movements have become highly networked and decentralized. How does an autonomous network of protest visually represent worthiness, unity, numbers, and its claims in public space? How does public space work as a platform to shape and ground the performance of new modes of association? What are the social and symbolic challenges in activist event management in public space?
Since the eviction from Liberty Park, Occupy Town Square formed and began organizing an iterative series of pop-up events in public spaces with an aim to make its strategy and tactics replicable. Daniel Latorre, an Occupy Town Square collaborator and public space advocate, will talk about the process and experiences to date and suggest visions of where collaboration can go in this context.
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