REAL PLACES MAINE

REAL PLACES MAINE is a research project towards the creation of site-responsive, large poster-murals to be installed on the exteriors of abandoned buildings at several locations across Maine. Sites and buildings will be studied and selected for how they inspire and invite creative responses to their highly specific environmental, social, and historical contexts and conditions. The research will also test mural materials viability, i.e. non-toxic inks, weather-proofing, compostable paper-fabric, and methods for attaching poster-murals to buildings in a non-permanent, non-destructive way. The project's ultimate aim is to create and display image-sensations of “belonging” and “place-ness” within Maine landscapes, built and natural.

Artist bios

smudge studio's work focuses on creatively adapting, moment to moment, to the changing planetary conditions we live within. Our media include photography, performative research, multiples, installation and micro-productions. Inspired by both ancient and contemporary observations of Earth’s time and place in the cosmos, we stage embodied engagements with the planet’s ever-transforming events and conditions—human and nonhuman. We take this to be a vital aesthetic-ecological act. In May 002022, smudge studio launched a site-specific project: OBSERVATORY, located in Belfast, Maine. In the midst of fast environmental change, OBSERVATORY’s mission was to generate experiences of curiosity, participation, and deep belonging to our home planet—and to its home, the cosmos.

Elizabeth Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist. While a professor of media studies (University of Wisconsin and The New School in New York), her scholarship focused on media, social change, and public pedagogy.

Jamie Kruse is an artist and Assistant Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design (NY). Their work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Onion Foundation, The Puffin Foundation Ltd., The New School Green Fund (Office of Sustainability, The New School); New York State Council for the Arts, Tishman Environment and Design Center, Brooklyn Arts Council, Rauschenberg Foundation, Nevada Museum of Art + Environment, Santa Fe Art Institute, Research Council of Norway, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Directangle Press, among others. In 002012 they co-edited Making the Geologic Now Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (punctum books).

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Observatory Belfast

Cover image: We Will Always Belong to the Change, cut steel sign on custom support, semi-permanent installation, Waterfront Toronto’s Port Lands, from Careful Infrastructures for Reassembled Lands, 002022 (Image by Lisa Hirmer)