White House

Description: Collaborative interactive painting installation where the audience paints discarded objects wrapped in primed canvas arranged like a model house.
Cost: $15,000 (space rent not included).
Duration: 6 weeks.
Location: Flexible.

Description

I propose a collaborative interactive painting installation and performance called White House.

Found/discarded household objects and furniture will be sourced from the streets in New York City and wrapped in primed canvas. They will be arranged showroom style in the gallery space. Canvas and bond paper will be draped on the walls. Acrylic paint in plastic tubs and brushes will be placed around the space and the audience will be invited to paint anything on the white surfaces over several weeks.

The artist will inhabit the space dressed in a primed canvas wearable, will ask the audience to paint on them, but also will replenish the paint, clean the brushes, and help the audience.

Several primed canvas wearables will be available for the audience to wear and can be painted on. Alternatively, the artist will invite the audience to wear voluntary clothes protection ponchos/coveralls, gloves, and shoe covers.

Five acrylic colors will be used: Yellow, Orange, Red, Green, Cobalt Blue. Tarp will be affixed to the floor to protect the floor surface.

The household objects will be arranged into different areas corresponding to home areas.

At the end of the exhibition, the painted canvases will be removed and archived, and the found objects will be discarded.

Statement

The name White House denotes one of the most important phrases in the world, a place from where important decisions are dispatched that affect the lives of people all over the world. In addition, the media in the US is so politicized and entertainmentalized that the expectation is almost tabloid. While most of the regular people in the US get up in the morning and go to their jobs and start working it seems that people in the White House work for the tabloid press and are constantly involved in some sort of a brawl, albeit not literally. Controversies, scandals, and divisions.

With this project, I will, together with the audience, create a different thing out of a white house. This is not a political work but a garbage transformation work that draws on my previous street art installations as well as a remake of Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room.

This project will reuse wasted objects, put the audience at the center of art-making, and submit a home arrangement to the creative process. It will seek to redefine the relationship between the artist, the audience, and transform the wasted/junk objects into art objects.

I will inhabit the White House wearing white canvas wearable. The audience participants will have the option to wear a primed canvas wearable as well and pick a wearable from a wearable wardrobe. They can also choose to continue working with a wearable from a previous participant. I will collaborate with the audience and perform rituals of dressing /undressing the audience participants with canvas wearables and protective clothing.

I see my work as a wall between me and the rituals of domestication, and oppression in the home. I use the painted surface to isolate myself from that reality and turn this oppressive construct into a playful arrangement.

White is an allusion to the blank canvas that every artist has to confront and clean rooms where activity is tightly controlled.

I am interested in the chaotic aspect of collaborative art-making, where everyone-creator transforms their environment.

White House is a continuation on a series of collaborative & interactive installation projects I have developed like White Room, Memory Replacement, Hands Icosahedron, DAF, Figment and Xquisite Corpse.

White House is inspired by New York City street graphical and graffiti culture where the surfaces are continuously exposed to all kinds of marks. In addition, to continue questioning: What is an art object? and develop work with minimal carbon footprint by reusing discarded objects.

During my walks in the city I would encounter entire living rooms disposed of on the sidewalk. I always wondered about these abandoned objects, how once they were lovingly cared for by a happy owner and now they sat on the sidewalk only to contribute to the landfill. Many artists have worked with discarded objects - I am interested in the process of transformation from discarded to art object.

Inspiration and Influences

I have always been obsessed with New York City’s street culture as well as its discarded objects which I call Spontaneous Installations. Why are these objects on the sidewalk, what kind of object life did they have, who used them and for how long, and why are they no longer necessary? Sometimes entire living rooms are left on the sidewalk and I am dying to find out where and what the owners of these objects are doing next.

Spontaneous Installations in New York City

No artist stands alone and my work and vision stands on the work of great artists, works like Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room, Christo Javacheff’s large scale works and Marina Abramović’s performances.

White House plays on the theme of performance art, what is performance art and who is the performing artist? In this project the audience will take an active role in the art making process.

Inspired in no small part by New York city which is the largest and most creative canvas in the world where the inhabitants constantly transform the city by performing and leaving marks.