Practice · In residence
A Year of Timed Observation
What twelve months in a shared live/work community could produce.
A twelve-month residency lets these practices converge into one body of work. The project is not predetermined; it grows through accumulation.
Subjects would include residents, visitors and collaborators, studio interiors, rehearsals and performances, public events, the streets and waterfront of Jersey City, everyday moments inside the building and collaborative sessions. Hundreds of individual works can become an installation, an archive, a wall of drawings, a digital index, a publication and an exhibition: not one event but a sustained period of observation.
What I would bring to a shared building
The practice is made for a place where artists and audiences regularly meet. Concretely:
- Portrait Booth at open studios and public events: short timed portraits of whoever sits down.
- Resident Portrait Archive: a growing set of timed portraits of the residency community over the year.
- Figure Drawing Sessions: regular timed sessions with a model, open to residents and neighbours, thirty seconds to ten minutes a pose.
- Live Drawing Sessions in rehearsals, on stage and at openings, drawn alongside dancers, musicians, actors and readers.
- City Drawing Walks: small groups draw the neighbourhood from direct observation under limited time.
- No Erasers Workshops for residents, neighbours and community groups.
- Resident Exchange: a dancer provides movement, a writer language, a photographer an image, a musician a performance; each becomes input for a physical response.
- Community Drawing Archive: the accumulating visual record of people and places encountered, shown at the end of the year.
Working across disciplines
The purpose is not to absorb every discipline into drawing. It is to let other disciplines become the conditions a drawing or painting responds to: dance gives gesture and movement, music gives rhythm and live observation, fashion gives silhouette and posture, writing gives language, photography and film give frames and scenes, performance gives ephemeral events to trace.
The practice needs no open flame, no fumes and no dust: paper, charcoal, markers, ink, acrylic and a camera.