Quodlibetica

The Space is Always Traveling Within Itself: A Residency Somewhere Other than Here

Written By: Andy DuCett Constellation 15 8.1.11

When I was a young, my parents put a limit on how many times I could re-arrange my bedroom.  Seriously, they were afraid I was going to wear out the carpet. I was 7 or 8. It all started when I found myself feeling bored with the configuration on my room; there was no pizazz. My little corner of the universe was too familiar and unexciting. Whenever I got this feeling, I would put on my a-little-too-large plastic football helmet and set about moving everything around: the posters, the dresser, bed, desk, bookshelf… everything (note: if you look at the first image of my sister and me, you’ll see the helmet). It was this re-arranging that helped stave off the triviality of my environment: the moving of the familiar into new orientations, the unfamiliar. Waking up in the morning was the best part. I sometimes forgot, just for a few seconds, where I was: “Where am I? What is this place? Is that my dresser? Why is it over there?”

This story came to mind when I first arrived at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina, a place where I was an artist-in-residence for two weeks earlier this summer. Calling itself a “living museum”, Elsewhere is set within a former three-story thrift shop where Sylvia Gray, Co-Director George Sheer’s grandmother, accumulated and sifted through 50 years of cultural cast-offs and detritus to carve out a living and become a neighborhood staple. Everything that Sylvia had in her store is now considered “collection” and available as objects to view or, if you’re an artist-in-residence, materials to work with.

As an artist-in-residence, you have many options:  Elsewhere houses an expansive wardrobe, hundreds of bolts of fabric, a woodshop, an artist-designed communal kitchen, multiple rooms, nooks, crannies, expanses and possibilities within which to explore and create. There is also a guest kitten-in-residence, named “Pete.” Elsewhere has positioned itself as physical infinity, encouraging various modes of expression as long as one rule is understood:  whatever is in the “collection” (i.e. anything that was there when the space was first unlocked after lying dormant for years following Sylvia’s death) is to be treated as a museum object.

That said, there is some flexibility.  If you have a good enough proposal and purpose for altering part of the “collection,” you’re allowed to do so on a case-by-case basis. This is literally a place where dreams are allowed and activated; I heard the term “Utopia” bandied around multiple times during my two-week stay.

As a museum, Elsewhere is confounding and challenging to the new visitor. We all have preconceived ideas of what museums are and are not. The visual language of these institutions is so pronounced that we imagine something very different than what Elsewhere has to offer: “Where are the antiquities?  Where are the marble busts and breakable chairs that are most definitely not for sitting in? What’s with all the hippies?” You may get the feeling that this can’t be a museum, because you used to have these things, or people you know used to have these things… these are too common, why would something that I know/love/use be important enough to be museum-worthy?

This familiarity is part of the concept. It isn’t anyplace you’ve previously traveled, but it becomes instantly comfortable in a way you couldn’t have expected. You arrive at memories and distinctions. It’s largely due to the stuff that makes up Elsewhere’s collection and how these objects are presented, those thrift store items that range from fabric, scrap metal, board games, LP’s, cups, saucers and a surprisingly incredible cross-section of early 1980s toys and action figures. We’ve seen these things before, some of them perhaps not for a while. It was fascinating to experience this familiarity while seeing others going through the experience with the unfamiliar over and over again.

Once you’ve gotten used to this, you start to notice while being in the building that everything moves, and you’re constantly arriving at something new, something that has changed since the last time you were there or the last time you saw that object. I was told during my orientation that when you go from your desk on an errand upstairs to cut a piece of wood, you should be prepared to have it take two hours instead of two minutes, as you never know with what or whom you’ll become engaged. Elsewhere literally means somewhere else. Where? Oh, somewhere other than here.

Which gets to a conversation I had with George about this idea of travel. He said this:

Elsewhere is a place of convergence for life lines… as much as everyone and every object traveled to get to Elsewhere, travel attracts as much as it sends. “You’re constantly arriving and departing.”  It’s about movement, and everything we do in our daily lives (or the metaphor for art making that is simmering here) is enriched by being comfortable with change and satisfying the need to explore. Within every movement there is infinite potential for travel, and even if we don’t want change, everything moves around us.

George also mentioned that there is a black hole installed under the “skyscraper” next to the kitchen… “everyday a little bit of matter gets sprinkled in… you won’t notice it, but about every week or so, everything moves about a centimeter.”

I don’t know if travel is a metaphor for art-making or art-making is a metaphor for travel, but they both get along so well. Both are probably true. What we come to understand when traveling in any way is that while we may go somewhere different, we bring our habits and histories with us. How far away we decide to deviate from those familiarities is up to us, but it’s the movement that is essential.

Elsewhere was a perfect literal and figurative place to examine this thought. You may go up into a part of the building and see that something is just different enough to find that you’re arriving somewhere new… and by the time you come back, something might have changed and you’ve arrived again, even though you had thought you were departing.

Special thanks to George Sheer and Rob Peterson of Elsewhere for their conversations surrounding this essay.