Messages | ETC
“Messages” Exhibition, organized with Elsewhere ETC
The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro
January 13th to May 31st, 2009
Opening Reception: April 3rd, 6-8PM
“Messages” was a group exhibition produced by the ETC collective (Elsewhere Tenured Collaborators, aka alumni) located in the lobby of The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.
It included mail art collected through a project called “Elsewhen Meanwise Otherwhere” that was organized by Claire van der Plas with Andrea Low and exhibited in New Zealand in 2008.
From Elsewhere’s February 2009 newsletter [Note: The video mentioned is imbedded below]:
“We've installed a new show called "messages" in the foundation offices. Its about all kinds of messages and messangers. The show opens on friday April 3rd 6-8pm, but if you can't wait, stop by and see it at Foundation Place: 330 South Green Street. Poke around the office, and be polite to the receptionist. To learn more about this collaborative work by Elsewhere's "etc" artists visit the Community Foundation website and watch the Messages video on the homepage.”
From Elsewhere’s April 2009 newsletter:
“OUR FIRST FIRST FRIDAY. Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Pass the word, a note, a gesture, a glance...Messages!
Elsewhere is pleased to announce an etc. group show (elsewhere tenured collaborators) taking place from 6 - 8pm, Friday April 3rd at the Community Foundation. Meanwhile, at Elsewhere from 6-11pm, After-words extends the concept of the Messages show to Elsewhere's living museum with an interactive environment of artworks in sound, sculpture, installation, works on paper, performance and video.
After-words will mark the beginning of Elsewhere's spring season. Multiple artists will be curating multi-sensory experiences, exploring all forms of communique and what happens "after-words," when language breaks down and leaves us grasping at flashes of color and composition.
SPREAD THE WORD: Send a memo to colleagues, dry erase it in your office break-room, scribble the date in the margins of a phonebook, scrawl it out on the sidewalk, and whisper on down the line. - Elsewhere 09”
Claire wrote about the project in a paper called “Keeping in Touch” which was presented at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Mobile, Alabama October 22-24, 2009.
“This paper examines the connections and differences between the traditional postal space of the stationery letter in a mailbox and the new space of posting on social networking sites and blogs. Elsewhen Meanwise Otherwhere, a mail-art project I coordinated in 2008, involved sixteen artists across North America making art, mailing it and reworking each other’s art. It showed in Rm103 Gallery, Auckland New Zealand and in Greensboro North Carolina. 888 Friends, my current project, centers on one of the new postal spaces, Facebook. Referring to these two projects I explore issues such as tactile versus digital, slow versus instant. Additional concerns include role-playing and the adoption of personae and ‘voices’, collaboration, the surrender of authorship and the role of chance. Just as the development of the modern postal system provided early twentieth-century artists with elements for a new aesthetic, so the online social networking systems have led to the evolution of ever fleeting forms of postal ephemera. This has created both nostalgia for the tactility of ‘snail mail’ and new expressions of postal art in response to the new postal spaces.”
“Messages” Exhibit at The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, 2009
Photos courtesy of Curtis’ Flikr account, found here.
