Lately, I've been thinking.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation: a model for Social Sculpture Institute?

The Center for Land Use Interpretation

http://www.clui.org/

"... we work within the miasmic grey area [and study the subjective experience of landscape], where conflicting and even contradictory things can exist at once, overlapping, in a space where paradox is a continuous predicament, and is recognized as another form of truth... Our work is about America, and more accurately the USA. Who are we? How does our lanscape, build and altered by our society, harbor meaning about us, collectively, and even individually? We collect information and imagery on places of every concievable type all over the country. We then draw from this collection of places and representations of places to make exhibitions, tours, and other public programs. We can make thematic programs, looking at one sort of phenomenon as it occurs in differnet or similar forms across the land, or we can do regional projects, where we take a defined area, and see what is there, creating a characterization of that region, and making inferences about how that region relates to, and within, the larger context of the country."

- Matthew Coolidge, Director of The Center for Land Use Interpretation

Room Furniture

some quick renderings for an idea for the furniture for the room within the room

Ford Foundation: Supporting Diverse Art Spaces Initiative

Good news!:

the NY Times Article

the first Paragraph:

Grants Nurture Arts Spaces and Housing
by Stephanie Strom

"As part of an effort to increase the impact of its giving, the Ford Foundation is to announce a plan on Monday to dedicate $100 million to the development of arts spaces nationwide over the next decade. The plan is by far the largest commitment the foundation has ever made to the construction, maintenance and enhancement of arts facilities."

(de)construction begins!

Sherman's Restaurant, second floor. 601 Tully's future floorboards in their original condition.

Safety first!

Cleaning up (note the light filtering in made visible by the amount of dust we kicked up cleaning).

Andrew and Jeff start ripping up floor boards.

The de-nailing and sorting set up outside. On tables we found inside Sherman's. We are so resourceful.

So happy to be outside doing manual labor for 601 Tully!

Group effort.

De-nailing up close and personal.

Floorboards ripped up, de-nailed, sorted and stacked between 9am and 12:30pm

Almost there!

Floorboard detaching process.

Last four (barely) standing.

Speedy transport of floorboards from upstairs to outside (as opposed to passing each board down to a person who would then stack them like we had been doing earlier). Also, the pile on the ground is the wood that still needs to be de-nailed.

Final product! This is all the de-nailed flooring that is now sitting in the Warehouse gallery as seen in Andrew's pictures.

Overall it was a fun and very productive day. I think we all enjoyed getting out and doing some physical work for the project. And at least it wasn't cold out. Hope everybody's hammer arm is feeling alright today.

Floor Dis/Re Installation

Installed View. This is about 1/3 of the floor we recovered; the rest awaits de-nailing at Shermans. The short section of floor we laid down will act as a stage/ link for/to the ambiguous object - wall, and the bench challenges people to sit and contemplate the installation's use of work-in-progess recycled material (keep in mind that the floorboards are still quite dusty and gross).

Womb Room Frame

Just right....and ours for the taking.