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PICTURES OF PICTURES

From the Richburg Historical Museum. "The town of Richburg didn't have any laws about where you could set up a derrick."

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geography

tourism

food

public

education

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The People's Guide

Locals shared their favorite sites, local lore, scenic routes and personal landmarks by creating guide pages for inclusion in the People’s Guide of Allegany County.

Exhibited at the Fosdick Nelson Gallery in Alfred, New York. Visitors to the gallery also added 'personal landmarks' to the large magnetic map of the local county.

Click to see all the posts from The People's Guide.

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LOCAL TABLE, THE FIRST PUBLIC MEAL EVENT WAS A TASTY SUCCESS!

Local Table celebrated the bounty of the season by asking friends and community members to donate food from their gardens or other items that they produce (eggs, honey, wine, flowers). Angie To and Michelle Illuminato gathered the goods and created a meal using only those local ingredients. Gardenless people baked bread for the meal and eleven people volunteered to help make it happen! It took place on September 10th at the 104 year-old Parish House of the Seventh Day Baptist Church in Alfred. After the meal, Jonas Lindburg, a local artist-forager gave a slide show about the finding of the puffball mushroom that we grilled for the meal.

A big thank you to: Alfred State’s Center for Organic and Sustainable Agriculture Chase Angier, Ellen Bahr, Laurel Carpenter, Diane Cox, Eric Ewald, Jason Green, John Hosford, Robin Howard, Kinfolk (Jessen and Elliott, Jonas Lindberg, Living Acres Farm, Stephanie McMahon, Megan Staffel, The Bread Bakers (the best part), Ben, Charlotte, Ezra, Ellen, John, Emily, Nick, Laurie, Brett, Quest Farms (Bridget and Denis), and the Westacott Family.

The Menu Pumpkin Apple Soup Creamy Celery Root Soup with Potato and Leeks Rustic Vegetable Tarts with Eggs Grilled Puffball Mushroom, marinated in garlic and herbs Homemade Wild Apple Sauce Sautéed Turnip Greens, Swiss Chard,  and Kale with Caramelized Onions Homemade Mozzarella, Basil, and All-Kinds-of-Tomato Salad Fresh Leaf Salad with Garlic Pesto Dressing Roasted Zucchini, Tomatoes and Turnips Bread and Butter Pickles and Dill Pickles Home-baked bread including: rustic white, no knead, whole wheat, and zucchini. Warm Apple Crisp Sumac, Lemon Verbena, and Honey Tea Mint Infused Water

PUBLIC Meal is a local roving restaurant, people gatherer, info spreading, healthy food event in western New York. The changing theme and menu, seeks to gather people around a table for conversations about local issues, food, culture and ruralness.

PUBLIC Meal encourages a thoughtful attitude towards food consumption, preparation and production. See more Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruralscape/sets/72157627291068833/

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Personal Landmarks

Visitors to the Fosdick Nelson Gallery in Alfred, New York marked the magnetic map with their personal landmarks of the area.

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Donated By Book Available!

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The Detour Show August 13th, 2010. The Waffle Shop, Pittsburgh, PA Poster for the Detour Show

The Detour Show’s host,

Michelle Illuminato

and her band of local guides took the live and online audience on a series of ‘detours’ through Pittsburgh. The show was packed with interviews, favorite points of view, mostly true facts, slideshows, games and dancing (just kidding about the dancing).

The live audience learned about Pittsburgh's famous, nearly famous and infamous citizens and what their homes look like from across the street. Together they visited the largest collection of relics outside the Vatican...and discovered the identity of the mystery guest, nationally known filmmaker Rick Sebak. Then everyone tested their knowledge by playing

“Identify This Spot”

and

“I Know a Secret”

and competed for unique Pittsburgh prizes!

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Book Report

This is an open call for participation in the event Book Report to be shown at the Bowman, Penelec and Megahan Galleries in Meadville PA and online. The project surveys what people are reading in their daily lives...from the special to the mundane. All contributed texts will be read to the gallery audience for 8 hours on September 3 and throughout the duration of the exhibition. You are invited to contribute! Is there something that you read today that you think is fantastic, absurd, well-written low-end, mind-boggling, insightful, dull, cool, or plain weird, that you’d like us to read out loud at the exhibition? Still no idea of what to contribute? If you wrote a list of everything you read today, what would be on it? (For me, it would start with the instructions on the back of the coffee pot.) Is there an article, a list, a series of signs, a bill, a recipe, a paragraph in a book, a comic, or something else that just sticks with you? Pick one of those things and quick (don’t think too much!) stick it in the mail or email me a copy of it before August 30th! It will be read during the exhibition and documented online later in the month. If you prefer to be anonymous, let me know that as well! Thanks a bunch for participating! Michelle Illuminato 15 Elm Street, Andover, NY 14806 or email: michelleATnextquestion.org A little more about Book Report Book Report will consist of two parts, a body (the performed readings) and an appendix (the collected texts). The readings will be performed at a central podium, and the texts will be located on the wall and floor around the podium. The public will act as the readers, either reading their own texts or selecting one from the contributed texts and books in the gallery. During the 8-hour workday, on the hour, invited ‘special readers’ will read a selection from something they consider ‘very special’. The project will be exhibited from September 6 -25 as part of the 8 Hour Projects Sustaining Practice, Community and Self at the Bowman, Penelec, and Megahan Galleries at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. The Work-in-Progress Day is Saturday 3, from 10 – 6 and the opening is Tuesday September 6, from 7-9 pm. Curated by Colleen Toledano and Darren Lee Miller.

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Chapter X Video slideshow (214 images. 18 m.), digital print (10m x .5) and audio

Explor-art, International workshop of Terrestrial Exploration and Exhibition, 2010 AreaOdeon Gallery, Monza, Italy Brett Hunter and I drew inspiration from the investigation of a 19th century English tourist guidebook to construct a contemporary tour of Monza, Italy. Removing all of the object and place words from this text, we used this comprehensive list as a map to explore the city. The search for and documentation of examples of these words allowed us to be ‘lost’ in the present of our experience. The constant refrain of the ‘list’ going through our heads acted as a lens to focus our exploration, “…columns, lions, gilt figure, door, dove, vase, mouth, water, head, crown, altar, tree, cross, transept, passenger, spot, dwelling-place…”

See full length slideshow at: http://vimeo.com/18784778 To learn more about AreaOdeon go to: http://www.areaodeon.org

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Wild Food Cook-Off

Open Engagement, Portland Oregon, May 15, 2010.

The Wild Food Cook-Off gave the public the opportunity to taste, share and judge the best in foraged and wild foods of Portland. Individual cooks, foragers, and cart owners submitted their best ‘dish’ using local foraged and wild foods available for free in the urban spaces, waters and wild lands of Oregon. The event provided an opportunity for discussion about local foods via foraging walks (Thanks Urban Girl!) and allowed people to experience tantalizing food sensations like dandelions, wild leeks, mushrooms, wild-weed flavored seltzer waters, morels, elk, eel, a homemade wild-yeast mead, and even local nutria chili! Visit the blog from the project at http://wildfoodcookoff.wordpress.com/

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Chapter X

Chapter X was created in Monza, Italy for Explor-art at AreaOdeon Gallery, Monza. Brett Hunter and I collaborated and drew inspiration from a 19th century English tourist guidebook to construct a contemporary tour of the city. We went through the text and 'lifted' the object and place words to form a list of 214 words. We used this list as a guide to see the city as we searched and photographed examples of each word.

The constant refrain of the ‘list’ going through our heads acted as a lens to focus our exploration, “…columns, lions, gilt figure, door, dove, vase, mouth, water, head, crown, altar, tree, cross, transept, passenger, spot, dwelling-place…”  while giving us the chance to be ‘lost’ in the present of our experience.

For the exhibition at the AreaOdeon Gallery, we projected a huge slideshow beside a 10 foot print of the original text, san nouns of course.

Click here to see all posts from the Chapter X Project or click below to see the video.

Video slideshow (214 images. 18 m.), digital print (10m x .5) and audio

Explor-art, International workshop of Terrestrial Exploration and Exhibition, 2010 AreaOdeon Gallery, Monza, Italy

To learn more about AreaOdeon go to: http://www.areaodeon.org

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Donated By, a slideshow by Michelle Illuminato and Brett Hunter. Images taken at the Pioneer Oil Museum, Bolivar, New York.

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Guide/Vodič

Guide/Vodič was a project by next question with artist Kim Beck as part of the Outside Project, The work was shown at the Kontekst Galerija in the summer of 2006. With the idea of moving beyond the canonical sites and narratives presented by traditional guidebooks, we invited Belgrade residents and visitors to come into the Kontekst Galerija to create guidebook pages illustrating their personal landmarks and experiences in the city.

Gallery visitors were then able to construct their own guidebooks from the many photocopied pages that hung on the walls, ordering them as they liked, and binding them into covers designed by the artists. Blank pages were also available for visitors to document their own notions of Belgrade. We also added pages ourselves from our own experiences in the city.

We printed a letterpress version of Guide/Vodič at the New York Center for Book Arts in New York City. See www.nextquestion.org website for more information.

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Wild Food Cook-Off

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SOAPBOX WORKSHOP images

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Soapbox Workshop

Soapbox Workshop was an invitation to people to ‘get on the soapbox’ and share what they think with their neighbors. Originally created for the bi-locational exhibition Stations, that took place in the Finger Lake region, it created a pathline both figuratively and metaphorically between the two sites of the exhibition. Beginning at the CSMA in Ithaca, the artists walked with their soapbox to String Gallery at Wells College in Aurora. Along the way the artists asked people about local life and what they might feel strongly enough about to share atop the box. The mini speeches ranged widely in subject and conviction—from expressing delight for the summer theater from a local Snow White, to performing an educational rant about eliminating milk subsidies, or stating an opposition to a local bumper sticker, to finally one native resident who just wished people would stop telling others about the Finger Lakes! As the five artists walked from Ithaca to Aurora over the month of July, the route was marked both virtually and physically, using a chalk line and an online map. The soapbox speeches were ‘posted’ along the route and recorded, networked online, and documented within the galleries. Collaboration with Amos Scully, Stephanie Ashenfelder, Karen Brummund, Matthew Slaats in July 2009.

To see more images click Soapbox Workshop Images.

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SLIP PROJECT

SLIP is a photo series created while on residency at the Cite des Arts Internationale, Paris, France, during the months of January, June and July 2008. The series includes over 2500 images and one of those images graced the cover of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Inside the work is featured both in text and image. (See Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume 30, Number 1, 2009, cover, intro and pp. 78-82)

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Finding myself with the freedom to be a flâneur in a city famous for flâneurism, I looked through windows and peered through glass domes and cabinets, to study first-hand many of the objects that are on display from the important to the trivial to the sacred or even the counterfeit.

Acknowledging that the objects have highly constructed contexts and are used to help produce an overarching dominate story, I took a closer look at objects that seemed to speak beyond those pre-determined frames. Using my lens to capture a different perspective, I sought to ‘slip’ these objects from their contexts hopefully allowing other stories that they may represent to emerge. I am interested in this back-story, the one unwritten, and yet available with careful attention. Just as listening to people and communities reveals complex multiple perspectives even when the community is thought of as having ‘one-voice’, so may these objects provide new viewpoints that contrast, contradict and inform each other when placed side by side.