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http://www.temporaryservices.org/pi_overview.html
Prisoners' Inventions by Angelo and Temporary Services

chess set

salt and pepper shaker

This project was a collaboration with Angelo, an incarcerated artist. He illustrated many incredible inventions made by prisoners to fill needs that the restrictive environment of the prison tries to supress. The inventions cover everything from homemade sex dolls, condoms, salt and peper shakers to chess sets. We collaborated on this project with Angelo for over two years. We had many additional collaborators who made a book, exhibition of re-created inventions and a prison cell possible. This page offers an overview of the project thus far.

"When first approached with the idea of illustrating examples of inmate inventiveness, I was skeptical, thinking that there would be little of real interest to depict. When I set my mind to the task, though, I recognized the surprising range of inventions and innovations that I had witnessed. I had just become so used to it all that the uniqueness no longer registered."

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http://www.temporaryservices.org/

As we live, so we work

Temporary Services is a group of three persons: Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer, and Salem Collo-Julin. We draw on our varied backgrounds and interests to incorporate our aesthetic practice within our lived experiences. The need to create change within our daily lives translates directly to our public projects.

The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. We embed the creative work we present within thoughtful and imaginative social contexts and strive to create participatory situations.

We champion public projects that are temporary, ephemeral, or that operate outside of conventional or officially sanctioned categories of public expression. We appreciate such diverse activities as makeshift roadside memorials to accident victims, temporary housing encampments designed by homeless people, tree houses fabricated by children, and idiosyncratic public notices that get stuffed inside the display windows of free newspaper boxes. We like outdoor projects that are encountered by surprise rather than sought out with deliberation like exhibitions and special events. We especially appreciate those projects that do not have permission and challenge expected usages.

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http://www.independentschoolofart.org/

The Independent School of Art is a nomadic experimental art school. Without institutional affiliations, degrees, or public funding, the school exists solely through the labor and efforts of it's participants, and thus fosters a proactive approach to college-level arts education, a real-world model where students are challenged to determine and create their own artistic realities. The school's barter-based tuition system makes explicit and direct the social contract between students and teachers and honors their collective labor as a vital form of cultural production. By existing without a site and locating nomadically, the school prioritizes social over physical architecture, and challenges students and teachers alike to imagine how their practice might intersect and respond to a larger set of physical situations and cultural possibilities. Since the ISA is not driven by tuition payments, employee payrolls, facility maintenance, fundraising quotas, degree granting and accreditation requirements it can be fluid and experimental, changing each semester to reflect the ambitions, personalities, and abilities of those in its community.

The Independent School of Art includes students of all ages, levels of experience, and disciplines in a one-room schoolhouse environment of shared learning and mentorship. The ISA prioritizes an action-based approach to arts education and cultural discourse and complements it's curricular offerings with student and faculty designed exhibitions, lectures, grants and publications. These multi-disciplinary public actions are a central part of the school's pedagogy, and serve a vital function by engaging the students in the direct creation of public culture.

founded by artist Jon Rubin http://www.jonrubin.net

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http://www.bigboxreuse.com/

The Sugar Creek Charter Elementary School
Charlotte, NC
Renovated K-Mart

As superstores abandon buildings in order to move into bigger stores, what will become of the walls that they leave behind? It is within the answer to this question that we are seeing the resourcefulness and creativity of communities dealing with a situation that is happening all over the country: the empty big box. Through travel and the study of buildings, Julia is researching the way people build their towns, creating the context for their own lives.

Julia Christensen began investigating How Communities are Re-Using the Big Box in January of 2004. Since then, she has been traveling around the country in her car, visiting the sites and meeting the people who are making these transformations possible. She has been collecting a growing collection of photographs, interviews, stories, and documents relating to the renovations, and has been giving presentations in these communities about how other towns are dealing with this common situation. While exhibiting photographs and installing video and sound work generated from her travels, she is currently working on a book documenting her research. Julia continues to develop her traveling exhibit of artifacts exploring How Communities are Re-Using the Big Box.

The term "big box" refers to a large, free-standing building with one major room. This model was made very popular by the corporations that created stores with minimal storage space, the stock items simply coming in off the truck and on to the shelves. Because "big box" is a fairly new term, and since there are variations on the concept, there have been several occasions upon which Julia has arrived at a site and the "big box" was not quite what she thought it was going to be. Nevertheless, there has been something important to be learned at each of this locations. Her research has led her down many side streets, as she has learned about the choices people make in order to shape their town in order to accommodate their community.

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http://www.delpesco.com

Horwinski Poster Show
Nelson Gallery, UC Davis

This exhibition of fifty-five letter-press posters is just a small selection of the social and political event bills printed by Horwinski Press. Pulled from large stacks in the warehouse in Oakland, California, this accidental archive of popular history from the last fifty years is being exhibited for the first time.

The uncertainty of aesthetic authorship is notable as the clients of Horwinski often surrendered artistic control to the printers (mainly due to the technical limitations of the medium). The current proprietor, James Lang, and his father before him, are therefore largely responsible for the design of most of the material you see on view.

Several of the posters in this installation are considered "work-ups," samples for client preview, and were kept as a library of possibilities for future business. Upon close inspection you'll find the occasional inky fingerprint, hand-written note or spelling error which reveals changes and corrections in the printing process. Also in this mix are posters made for contemporary artists Jeremy Deller and Dave Muller. (James is also working on one for Richard Prince)

While letter-press printing has quickly become a nostalgic media form, pushed toward extinction by the flexibility of the full-color offset press, it's specific aesthetic and longevity are akin to the perseverance of black and white photography despite the invention of various forms of color imaging.

The events and images captured in this collection of material culture can retrieve fragments of vernacular memory, informing our idea of what it means to live in California.

(wall text from exhibition - Joseph del Pesco)

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