White House

Description: A collaborative painting installation where participants paint a showroom-style home created from discarded objects wrapped in primed canvas.
Cost: $15,000 (space rent not included).
Duration: 6 weeks.
Location: Flexible.

Description

A participatory, collaborative painting installation and performance called White House.

Found/discarded household objects and furniture will be sourced from the streets of New York City, wrapped in primed canvas, and arranged showroom-style in the gallery space. Canvas and bond paper will be draped on the walls. Acrylic paint in plastic tubs and brushes will be placed around the space.

Participants will be invited to paint anything on the walls, the objects, each other, and the artist over several weeks.

The artist will inhabit the space dressed in a primed canvas wearable to replenish the paint, clean the brushes, and help the participants.

Several primed canvas wearables will be available for the participants to wear and paint on. Alternatively, the artist will invite the audience to wear protective clothing: ponchos/coveralls, gloves, and shoe covers.

Five acrylic colors will be used: yellow, orange, red, green, and cobalt blue. A tarp will be affixed to the floor to protect the surface.

The household objects will be arranged into different areas corresponding to common sections of a house, such as a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room, and dining room.

At the end of the exhibition, the painted canvases will be removed and archived, and the found objects will be discarded.

Statement

The name White House denotes one of the most important phrases in the world: a place from which important decisions are dispatched that affect the lives of people all over the world. In addition, the media in the U.S. is so politicized and entertainmentalized that the expectation is almost tabloid. While most regular people in the U.S. get up in the morning, go to their jobs, and start working, it seems that people in the White House work for the tabloid press and are constantly involved in some sort of brawl, albeit not literally. Controversies, scandals, and divisions.

With this project, I will, together with the audience, create a different kind of white house. This is not a political work but a garbage-transformation work that draws on my previous art installations as well as a remake of Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room.

This project will reuse wasted objects, put the audience at the center of art-making, and submit a home arrangement to the creative process. It will seek to redefine the relationship between the artist and the audience, and to transform wasted/junk objects into art objects.

I have always been fascinated by the lives of objects in our homes, especially in the West. It seems we accumulate endless amounts only to store and discard them later.

During my walks in New York City, I would encounter entire living rooms disposed of on the sidewalk. I always wondered about these abandoned objects, how once they were lovingly cared for by a happy owner, and now they sat on the sidewalk only to contribute to the landfill. Many artists have worked with discarded objects; I am interested in the process of transformation from discarded to art object.

To me, the kitchen has always been the most controversial area of the home: the enormous lengths we go to simply boil some things in a pot.

And I've always been terrified by the roles of women as queens of the kitchen, as portrayed in the media. Watch carefully any Hollywood movie and there will often be an opening scene with a woman washing something in a sink, while the male counterpart runs the world or embarks on some other important mission.

I see my work as a wall between me and the rituals of domestication and oppression in the home. I use the painted surface to isolate myself from that reality and turn this oppressive construct into a playful arrangement.

White is an allusion to the blank canvas that every artist has to confront, and to clean rooms where activity is tightly controlled.

I am interested in the chaotic aspect of collaborative art-making, where every co-creator transforms their environment.

White House is a continuation of a series of participatory, collaborative installation projects I have developed, such as White Room, Memory Replacement, Hands Icosahedron, DAF, Figment and Xquisite Corpse.

White House is inspired by New York City’s street graphic and graffiti culture, the surfaces are continuously exposed to all kinds of marks. In addition, it continues to question: What is an art object? It also seeks to develop work with a minimal carbon footprint by reusing discarded objects.

Inspiration and Influences

I have always been obsessed with New York City’s street culture as well as its discarded objects which I call Spontaneous Installations. Why are these objects on the sidewalk, what kind of object life did they have, who used them and for how long, and why are they no longer necessary? Sometimes entire living rooms are left on the sidewalk and I am dying to find out where and what the owners of these objects are doing next.

Spontaneous Installations in New York City

No artist stands alone and my work and vision stands on the work of great artists, works like Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room, Christo Javacheff’s large scale works and Marina Abramović’s performances.

White House plays on the theme of performance art, what is performance art and who is the performing artist? In this project the audience will take an active role in the art making process.

Inspired in no small part by New York city which is the largest and most creative canvas in the world where the inhabitants constantly transform the city by performing and leaving marks.