Call for Entry recommended Rachel

CONTACT: Artist inquires should be directed to artstop.projectspaces@gmail.com.

The deadline for you to sign up for Project Spaces in near. Register here. It takes about five minutes to setup your profile and registration is free. All you need is a bio, a statement about your work and a few decent photos. You do not need to know what you’ll install for the event at this time.

The idea behind Project Spaces was inspired by an event called ArtPrize held annually in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The event famously awards the largest cash prize in the world for an art competition. ArtPrize is an international city wide installation of art and social experiment. Winners of the large cash prize are selected by popular vote.

Consider this:

For Project Spaces 2012, hopefully we don’t repeat too many of the unfortunate installations featured on ArtPrize Worst. What if Project Spaces meant covering Des Moines with site specific installations? Site specific meaning, art responding to the space installed through scale and material. One of the most difficult spaces from last years Project Spaces trial event was Capital Square. Two artists displayed work in the impossibly huge atrium. The space dwarfed and over shadowed the artworks.

Multiple installations from last year lacked a visual function in the spaces they were installed. If artworks are installed with site specific considerations, the idea of installing art all over Des Moines would transform into a quality and thoughtful experience. The art should need the space.  

When planning your installation, consider these wise words concerning site specificity from Richard Serra:

The specificity of site-oriented works means that they are conceived for, dependent on and inseparable from their location. Scale, size and placement of sculptural elements result from an analysis of the particular environmental components of a given context. The preliminary analysis of a given site takes into consideration not only formal but social and political charactersistics of the site. Site-specfic works invariably manifest a value judgement about the larger social and polical context of which they are apart. Based on their interdependence of work and site, site-specfic works address the content and context of their site critically. Site-specific solutions demonsrate the possibility of seeing the simultaneity of newly developed relationships between sculpture and contest. A new behavioral and perceptual orientation to a site demands a new critical adjustment to one’s experience of the space. Site-spefic works primarily engender a dialogue with their surroundings. Site-specific works emphasize the comparion between two separate languages that can therefore use the language of one to criticize the language of the other. To quote Bertrand Russell on the problem: ‘Every language has a structure about which one can say nothing in that language. There must be another language, dealing with the structure of the first and processing a new structure about which one cannot say anything except in a third language - and so forth.’

-Richard Serra from The Yale Lecture, Art in Theory 1900 - 1990

 

Register for Project Spaces.