Opportunity is the driving concept of my current body of work, more specifically "what does opportunity mean to each person?" My obsession with this idea of opportunity is a personal one that stems from the recognition of my own opportunities in life, but also this thought of being thankful for what you have even when it feels like you have nothing. I struggled with this desire to do "art for good", a phrase often repeated by a fellow artist and role model Eric Fuertes who always talked about making art that made the world better,not worse. Thus I was challenged with how to do just that. A fundraiser? An activist demonstration? A public sculpture? I was stuck.
I knew I wanted to make my show interactive, participatory, and "For good" but I didn't know how to make it interactive enough, and if it was interactive in the gallery space then it was only accessible to those who go to the gallery. This just didn't feel right to me. I wanted to bring attention to the wide spectrum of what could be considered an opportunity, and by limiting it to simply those who attend gallery openings or go to galleries to look at art it felt quite limiting and not what I was looking for.
Much advice and brainstorming later with the faculty and grad students, and no short amount of research, I decided to really explore the field of Social Practice and Cooperative art. This was exciting but also terrifying (still is) because I had only ever read about social practice artworks and never seen a BFA student tackle it for their show.
I had explored the use of the door as a metaphor for opportunity for the five months before I settled on the method of social practice, and it has remained with me throughout the entire journey. I made doors, cast them in resin, cast them in bronze, cast them in iron, painted doors, and started a bulky real door collection. I was a bit door crazy that is for sure. There was something so appealing about the small scale doll house doors I had cast in an off white resin that I knew I wanted to utilize them. During an off chance encounter with a classmate of mine she had ordered the wrong size hinges for her project and something about them spoke to me. I did not know what I was going to use them for yet, but they spoke to me to have them and use them for something (Not literally). Turns out they fit almost perfectly on the resin doors I had cast for a previous project and that is when things began to click in place. My brain was thinking of all sorts of installments of these doors now that they had functional hinges, and that is when my professor Leticia Bajuyo was playing around with the doors and created this maqette of a "book" hinging two doors together. That was it. Bingo.
Currently I have created a template that has rectangles the size of the doors on them along with a prompt about opportunity. "Think about opportunities in life you have been given, and that you have given others". Participants are then asked to fill the rectangles on the sheet responding to the prompt however they feel. For practical purposes it has to be relatively flat, because the responses are to be adhered inside the "Books" from doors and collectively create an archive. I want this process to be a reflective one for participants, but also for people who see the shows final product as well. By seeking out people outside of the gallery demographic to participate it makes the work more invasive and gives others the opportunity to think and be a part of something they would not have been normally.
There are many artists in the field of social practice I have been influenced by including Mel Chin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles , Joseph Beuys, Sean Starowitz, and countless others. The way these artists each utilized a certain community as part of their work or a certain social group was fascinating and I wanted to find my own target "group" for my work, which ended up being everyone possible. Faculty, friends, co workers, family, local city programs, high schools, and anyone who has access to this template is a part of this work as far as I'm concerned. I ask participants to share the "Project" with a friend or two after they complete it so it travels almost like a chain email would. Speaking of which if you want to participate yourself the link to the template is below!
"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives" Joseph Beuys
I am still working out the technical aspects and working to collect responses to finalize the work that goes in the gallery but I plan to make every response part of the show in some shape or form if not in the form of "Book archives". This is the origins of the "Open Door Project" and where I will continue to post about the creative process up to the final installation of the show for my BFA show.