PRESENTING THE PIGEON WING

This week we had a small conversation with Sarah Jury about the Pigeon Wing:

1. When and how did the Pigeon Wing start?
After graduating from Central St Martins Collage of art in 2008 Sarah Jury, Alastair T. Willey and Isobel Shirley registered the need for a platform for new and emerging artists to realize their ideas, present them to the public and open them up for discussion.
We were able to open The Pigeon Wing when we found our current home, which is an old Victorian warehouse in South London. We moved the pigeons out (hence the name), we built walls, plumbed and put in electrics and invited people to our first event in December 2008.

2. What are your main activities and how do you keep things running? (team, funding, etc)
The Pigeon Wing is not for profit and is currently in the process of finding funding. We keep things running by offering ourselves as a facility, exchanging our skills and space for collaboration to present interesting projects.

3. Can you tell us a little about some former projects/exhibitions at the Pigeon Wing?
In 2009 we presented 7 exhibitions, 2 residencies, monthly Sunday Crits, film screenings and events.
Last year our Residency program brought a total of 6 international artists to London for the first time. Staying for 3 weeks, these artists had the freedom and time to develop new work for the exhibitions that concluded their stay at The Pigeon Wing.
Art / Value / Currency is one of our ongoing projects, which focuses on the exchange of art and its discussion. We exhibited Part One in November of 2009. The project is now being developed further in New York and will return to The Pigeon Wing later this year.

4. What is your visions for your space/platform?
We feel that not catering to a commercial audience is important in realizing innovative unlimited projects. Doing this provides the public with the opportunity to see new uncompromised types of work while also facilitating our peers and other emerging artists in realizing their ideas without asking them to fit into a white box space. The Pigeon Wing’s regular open critiques make the projects we present a dialogue, so that the opportunity is made to develop ideas further. Retaining an open dialogue is very important to us.

Click here to learn more and apply to take part in the last Open Call promoted by The Pigeon Wing.

DESCRIBING ELSEWHERE ARTISTS

This week we spoke with George from Elsewhere Artists Collaborative, who launched the Open Call for Residencies in Greensboro, NC:

Let us know a little about how Elsewhere Artists Collaborative started...
"In 1937, Joe and Sylvia Gray moved from Mount Airy NC, and started a furniture business at 607 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro. Realizing that trucks full of new North Carolina furniture were going to New York and then returning empty, the Grays began buying repossessed depression surplus, namely furniture, in New York and shipping it back to Greensboro for repair and sale. Following WWII, the store morphed into a surplus business and catalog sales company, Carolina Sales Co. The accumulation amassed over the company’s lifetime remained in a mountains of things, boarded up after her death in 1997.
Inspired by the potential for these "found objects" as artistic resource, I (George Scheer, Sylvia’s grandson) recruited fellow artists and friends to begin excavating Sylvia’s old store in May 2003. Elsewhere became a 501©3 non-profit organization in 2004, and thanks to a first lucky grant from Greensboro’s United Arts Council, some chance movie shoots, a lite-brite commission, and then an active, incessant, absolute fury of unpaid work and resourceful transformation, we made it to the five year mark, which seemed to be a temporal launching point for solid longevity through state and national grants enabling our current sustainable growth."

You call yourself "a living museum and experimental production environment in downtown Greensboro, NC". What do you mean by "museum" in this case? Please elaborate.
"Elsewhere’s living museum reimagines a former thrift store as a site for ongoing collaborative productions and creative explorations. Visitors encounter a 58-year collection of thrift and surplus amassed largely by one woman, Sylvia Gray, during her tenure of a series of businesses at the location from 1939-1997. That collection has been transformed by hundreds of creators. Now, the living museum presents a moment in the process of activating a circulating and transforming the collection through interactive artworks, object arrangements, process displays, and project presentations."

Also, I’m sure many of our users don’t know much about Greensboro, NC. Enlighten us please :-)
"Thanks for asking, gso is a funny home to us all that we never expected to be living in, it is a wonderful place in a transitive point in its city-lifecycle, and residents tend to find a welcoming and enchanting setting."

And in connection with this, what is the story behind the residency?
"Elsewhere residencies invite creatives of all kinds to experiment with context, process, and collaboration within a three-story former thrift store turned living museum. Residents endlessly compose and re-imagine Elsewhere’s environment through creative and critical projects by using the immense at-hand resources from the 58-year inventory as both material and inspiration for site-specific investigations."

How do you run it on a day-to-day basis? How do you fund it?
"As a non-profit, we like being accountable to the public for the art that we make and the cultural services we provide. We raise our basic operating costs through museum admissions, memberships, event admissions, private donations, fundraisers, tours, educational programs, and services. Our programming costs are covered through grants and special projects, commissions, private and public contributions, fees, and private initiatives. We have cheap rent thanks to the Grey family. We keep our costs really low and hundreds upon hundreds of people give their time and talent without a speck of financial reward."

What is your vision with the residency?
"Elsewhere is an ongoing, unfolding story of life as an art form. We remain open to being visible, being read, considered, interpreted, imbued with meanings we didn’t intend. We see ideas through their enactivity. We are all collaborating on curating this process, wherein we follow tributaries, trajectories, caverns, methods, experiments, that express our wonder and agency in an ongoing unfolding of this story of making something becoming."

Click here to learn more and apply to take part in the project.

TALKING ABOUT THE BOX

Yesterday we had a talk with Lars Vilhelmsen, the founder of The Travellers Box Project.

Wooloo: What is the concept behind The Travellers Box?

Lars Vilhelmsen: The Travellers Box project is an artistic discourse between artists
where a “box” (an empty metal suitcase) is used as the mediating object. The Box is sent from artist to artist and from country to country. During this process, individual artists' viewpoints, their thoughts and interactions with the Box, combine with the relationships that develop because of it. Its creation and interpretation becomes driven by artists both interacting with the Box, but also building a series of networked relationships, both nationally and globally.

Wooloo: When did the project start?

LV: The Box project started back in 2004 and has undergone various changes from The Travellers Secret Box to The Sandwich Box for new inscription in form of The Travellers Box 2009 which includes The International Box and The Local Box.

Wooloo: Tell us about a couple of memorable collaborations with artists?

LV: The cooperation with the UK-based artist Karen Ay have had tremendous importance to the project. Karen has been in the project for several years and without her the project would not have been where it is today. Also the Norwegian artist Tulle Ruth have had a huge importance to the project.

An art project which is memorable is made by Nick Tobier from Detroit - first of all the artwork was very good, but it also was the starting point in relation to The Travellers Box's United States journey, since then the project has developed in the US to include Boston, New York and Miami which include three co-curators.

Another memorable point was in 2007 - the project just seemed to grow and grow, and there was so many possibilities. I realized that a new construction was near by, therefore I invited two artists - two good friends in the project, and we became the working group behind The Travellers Box project.

Wooloo: The Travellers Box project took part of Wooloo's NEW LIFE BERLIN festival in the summer of 2008 – how did that turn out?

LV: NEW LIFE BERLIN was an important event for The Travellers Box project. A new direction started here. Many artists applied for the box via Wooloo and new co-operations started.

It was a great feeling to be a part of the festival, because many of the ideas of the constructions which are central to Wooloo – are ideas similar to those of The Travellers Box project. And finally the co-operation with the Wooloo team was great!

Click here to learn more and apply to take part in the project.