Baltidelphia
January 9th to February 6th, 2010. The Hexagon, in conjunction with My House Gallery (Philadelphia), presents: Baltidelphia, an experimental collaboration curated by Phuong Pham (the Hexagon) and Alex Gartelmann (My House). The Baltidelphia exhibition features 21 Baltimore artists paired with 21 Philadelphia artists who were asked to collaborate/correspond through whatever means they chose–facebook, text message, twitter, carrier pigeon, postal mail, sky-writing, etc. Rather than get lost in the flood of tweeting that flickrs to your tumbl that feeds to your blog (LOL smileyface), Baltidelphia embraces communication, distance, and geography as points of departure to create a project.
For the past few months, I have been in communication with my assigned artist, Jenny Mullins. Through emails and phone calls, we discussed possible ideas and arrangements for our final project. We settled on sending one another 7 to 10 “somethings” (drawings/experimentations on a small scale) and working into the other’s pieces to hang in our respective cities. I created paper cuts that I installed to hang over Jenny’s pencil drawings.
The Philadelphia opening was last night and very successful! I took a kind of poor photo of the final installation here.
I look forward to what Jenny made using the pieces I sent her:
The words I chose for these paper cuts were plucked directly from our email exchange and notes from phonecalls. Since the project took place over busy times in both of our lives, it is not surprising that there would have been so many time-related words. I will have to wait until February 6th for the Baltimore show reception!