As a community-driven experiment in field recording, throughout the month of May our main gallery will be used as a headquarters for abstract mapping of bicycle-powered experiences. We invite you to come map your routes, record your thoughts, pin found specimens to the wall and share with us the joy of riding the world’s best transportation device.

As a community-driven experiment in field recording, throughout the month of May our main gallery will be used as a headquarters for abstract mapping of bicycle-powered experiences. We invite you to come map your routes, record your thoughts, pin found specimens to the wall and share with us the joy of riding the world’s best transportation device.

Here is how you can contribute:

1. Go for a ride and come back with “artifacts” or objects that you find while riding. Pin them to our “Ride Artifact” wall and record the time and date you found the object.
2. Go for a ride and take a photo of where you are or of your bike. E-mail us (jenny@space538.org) and we will print it out in black and white and pin it to our photo bulletin board.
3. Go for a ride and stop by SPACE to map your route using either our map of downtown Portland, or our map of greater Portland. We will provide t-pins and string for you to use to show us where you rode.
4. Use our maps to tell us about specific locations you can access on your bike. Is there a great place to watch the sunset or a perfect location to pick dandelions? Take a sticker and place it on the location. Use the bike journal to number the sticker and tell us about the location.
5. Go for a ride and take some video. Send us your video files (mp4 preferred) and we will project them on the walls of the gallery.
6. See our bulletin board for other prompts and ideas.

Our faithful correspondent Alex Steed sent us this post:

The Perennial Plate is coming to Portland and my excitement is boundless.

As it is described on its website: “The Perennial Plate is an online weekly documentary series dedicated to socially responsible and adventurous eating. The episodes follow the culinary, agricultural and hunting explorations of chef and activist, Daniel Klein.”

I produce Food Coma TV, a show that is similar in its mechanics, though somewhat oppositional in its message and delivery. We eat adventurously, but we do so in a way that is alcohol-soaked and arguably socially irresponsible. Our expeditions are culinary, but our content does not serve as an advocate for sustainability. We are the N.W.A. to Klein’s Tribe Called Quest.

This said, my interest in food stems from a love for sustainability movements. I ran for the Statehouse in Western Maine a few years back on a platform that was built around a reverence for food and the communities responsible for its cultivation and creation. Klein and camerawoman Mirra Fine have created a compelling, engaging body of work around these movements, opening access to many of these concepts in a digital, interconnected world.

In order for causes to be understood, accepted and adopted in this ever-evolving digital media sphere, they require charismatic, digital literates to evangelize for them, and this must be accomplished in as organic and entertaining a fashion possible. This is the role that Daniel and Mirra so elegantly play.

In most popular media, food has been stripped down to a mere commodity (with some exceptions, of course). The mainstream media has done to it what mainstream pornography has done to women over all of these years: the product has by and large been stripped of the context, complexities, and idiosyncrasies that make it beautiful. In its presentation, its role as a social dignitary, a cultural diplomat, has been minimized and in some cases stripped away altogether. As divergent as our topics are, I feel an affinity for the Perennial Plate because we are both, in our own ways, resisting this.

Of Perennial Plate, Food & Wine Magazine wrote that they produce “a level of culinary cinema verité that television can’t (or wouldn’t dare) match.” In this way, it accomplishes something radical that the Internet is allowing for in a post-cable society. It allows us a complex and non-prescriptive way of looking at a subject we all share a love for, but has been trivialized by the gatekeepers of the entertainment industry for too long. In this sense, Daniel and Mirra are liberators, and I welcome them to Portland.

Recess, an artists’ workspace in Soho that’s  both a studio and exhibition space, had  a project by John Miserendino, who reinterpreted Dan Graham’s original plans for his architectural structures and staged a series of three reenactments inside his Pavilion to translate existing artworks into personal terms.

The Armory show at Pier 94 was too full and crowded to really engage with the artwork, but it was fun people watching and an affirmation that what we show at SPACE is competitive with what art buyers like. Also it seems that its popular to include some kind of mirror in your artwork these days.

The Whitney Biennial had a few gems, and my favorite was the screening room of films and videos by Michael Robinson. I really hoped that the audience would sing along during “Hold Me Now,” Robinson’s  sample of clips from “Little House on the Prairie,” overlaid with the karaoke version of the Thompson Twins’ hit. Say what you will about the biennial phenom–I think people’s expectations are always too high, and no American biennial ever seems to please anyone. If Facebook is any indication, the fake Biennial apology site got more love than the real show.

The Independent Art Fair had more of the kind of work we’d show here at SPACE than the Armory. But it, too, was crowded and cramped. The Moving Image Contemporary Video art fair was a tough visit, too. Imagine a cocktail party full of giant tv screens paired with headphones. But I was glad to see the installation of Martha Wilson’s I have become my own worst fear.

El Museo del Barrio had one of the best outsider art shows I’ve ever seen, called TESTIMONIOS: 100 Years of Popular Expression. I particularly liked the room of paño (handkerchief) drawings, painstakingly elaborated by Chicano inmates in Texas. Go see it before it closes on May 9th.

The Cindy Sherman show at MOMA was a good reminder of the importance of seeing photography printed large in its full majesty. Also while at MOMA, I got to see the final day of the Reanimation Library‘s interactive installation in the education building, where visitors were invited to peruse an odd assortment of books to scan, copy and repurpose into new artwork.

Over in Brooklyn I had great conversation with Jen Rosenblit about her ideas about dance and what happened during her recent residency at Bodega. We talked about the fact that most people don’t have adequate vocabularies for discussing dance and movement and that it’s frustrating to hear someone compare her work to painting or other visual mediums.

The highlight of my trip was an open studio tour of the residency program at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace location, in the financial district. In three short hours I was only able to see about 15 of the 25 studios, because of the great conversations I had with the artists. I was particularly interested in:

• Agathe de Baillencourt‘s text-based landscape drawings
• Bang Geul Han‘s video lexicography of NPR and FOX news
• Jessica Ann Peavy‘s improv-dual actress-narrative performance
• Valerie Hegarty‘s faux-destroyed fine art and furniture
• Amy Whitaker‘s musings on artist as businessperson
• Rob Carter‘s time-lapse videos of plants

I also checked out the New Museum Triennial The Ungovernables (confounding), The Dependent Art Fair (MFA hubris?), a new show at Primetime (all purple) and had a wonderful dinner chat with Yanira Castro, a choreographer with whom we hope to do a project in 2013.

In a recent article for Business Week, Liz Ryan commends Joey for making a bold decision about what was right for him, leaving behind a position that didn’t utilize his talents. She writes, “Instead of getting his musical friends organized to stage a mini quitting concert, Joey might have been using his creative energies to come up with good ideas for the hotel and its patrons. One of my chief complaints about work in most big companies is that they make tasks and assignments so compartmentalized that bright people get squeezed into tiny boxes that waste their brainpower.”

Isn’t this the heart of what the creative economy is about? We need creative and innovative problem solvers at work, and it’s the best companies or organizations that skip the tiny boxes in favor of letting their workers reach their potential.

Unfortunately Ryan misses an opportunity to highlight the real purpose of the video, which was to bring attention to the injustices Joey experienced in his workplace. She should have noted that the Joey Quits “brand” extends to a new website which “serves to expose the abuses against workers that happen everyday in the hotel industry.”

We applaud Joey and company for being opportunistic with the attention they’ve received. Only a truly creative mind would think to turn a crappy hotel job into a workers’ rights movement.

Christopher Cambell's award-winning house, photo by Raymond Koch

1. Andy Graham sold Portland Color to New York City firm Designtex. You can read a MaineBiz article about it here. We particularly liked hearing Andy talk about the impetus of the sale: “The reason they chose to buy Portland Color was because of the quality of our work force.” Portland Color employs a number of artists that have worked with SPACE over the years. We wish them luck!

2. Winky Lewis and a small gang of artists worked with Joe Malone (also a SPACE Board member) to open a pop-up art gallery for the month of December. They’re having an opening on Wednesday evening.

3. Betsy Evans Hunt is the representative of American photographer Todd Webb’s estate, and she’s been working with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on a Webb exhibit called “After Atget: Todd Webb Photographs New York and Paris.” There’s an opening on December 9.

4. Our longest-standing Board member (and super landlord) Christopher Campbell designed a house on North Haven that was included in Dwell Magazine’s list of their Top 10 Homes in America. You can read a Huffngton Post story about it here. He’s up there with with some greats, including Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen.

What do we have in common? We tend to be grassroots, resourceful, innovative, responsive to our community, and focused on artistic excellence. But we certainly weren’t all the same, which was the exciting part. And we all came from a wide variety of kinds of communities.

We caught up with Sarah Wagner, who runs a residency program called DFLUX in Detroit along with her husband Jon Brumit, who you may remember from his project Vendetta Retreat at SPACE back in 2005. We hung out with Stephanie Sherman from Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina, and learned more about the residency programs they offer in their thrift-store-museum. We met Eleanor and Oliver Wise of The Present Group, a subscription art project that has channeled over $20,000 toward funding artist projects, stipends, and development of critical essays. We talked into the wee hours with Courtney Fink and Jeanne Gerrity from Southern Exposure in San Francisco about object oriented art and social practice. We learned about workshop structures from Mark Allen of Machine Project in L.A. and heard about their recent lockpicking class. We witnessed Works Progress host a Chicago version of Salon Saloon, which featured a fascinating segment on the history of phone directories in the Windy City.

Why phone directories? Because the conference doubled as the occasion to release threewalls’ newest project, Phonebook 3, a directory of independent art spaces, programming, and projects throughout the United States. We’re glad to be included in this book, which you can purchase on their site (do it!).

We are excited to continue conversations with our peers about these grassroots creative activities and innovative organizing models across the country, and would love to hear about your thoughts and experiences, too.

If you can’t make the screening, or don’t live in New York, you can purchase a copy of the DVD from Bill’s website.