San Francisco artist Kate Pocrass is a social practice artist and photographer. Pocrass leads viewers on self guided tours, dubbed "Mundane Journeys", perhaps similar to the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Cardiff-Millers work I think of as documentary, while Pocrass places more emphasis on self selected viewer-participants finding direct experience. Maybe the PSU social practice students will show her their Portland world. Pocrass speaks at the PSU art lecture series, 5th Ave Cinemas 510 SW Hall Room 92 7:30PM (The earlier you arrive the less chance to sit on he floor) Free
Earlier in the day, Molly Dilworth discusses Nothing and wins the copywriting award of the month:
""Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ‘cause the things themselves were part of what was there.
–David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
What are we looking for and what are we doing here? If you scratch the surface of most artists’ writings, the answer is always the same: we are trying to feel, to move and be moved; to find a way to transcend this life, this body, this mind. Neil Young said “everybody knows this is nowhere”—we’re in a limbo, a center point from which we send sorties to find that something which surrounds—something other than this nowhere.
The subject of the lecture is nothing: what it means—in a world full of too much, all the time—to make nothing. How does one turn something into nothing—or nothing into something—an important question since this alchemy is the essence of creating. Dilworth looks at a variety of models—from Emma Kunz to Brian Eno, Alex Katz to Martin Creed—to think through what we are doing when we make things.
In the modern world we live in air-conditioned suburbs where history and ritual are jettisoned, we have no spirit quest or sweat lodge. The context has changed but the search–and the tools–have not.
Molly Dilworth is an artist and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Dilworth has exhibited nationally and internationally including, Deitch Projects, Participant, Inc., Exit Art, X-Girl and Artists Space in New York and BM Suma Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey, and the Melbourne Art Center. In 2006 Dilworth curated the interactive exhibition “The Great American Store(age)” at Spring Gallery in DUMBO and “The Searchers”, a show with performances and catalog for the Elizabeth Foundation Gallery in NYC.
Dilworth will return to PNCA along with Amoreen Armetta to curate the group show, The Searchers in the Feldman Gallery + Project Space April 3 – May 24. “The Searchers” uses the construct of a first time eBay seller to explore the way that people connect, or don’t connect, through technology—websites, email, letters, newspaper, books, iPods…""
At PNCA www.pnca.edu Room 201 4PM Free
