update on Reaction Bubble

It was about this time two years ago that I sat in The Garden Center for a first meeting with Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus of LoVid (a New York-based multimedia duo), and Matt Towers (a Hartford-based ceramicist).  It was the start of a multiyear collaboration with LoVid at the helm, Real Art Ways acting as matchmaker, and the Rauschenberg Foundation as major funders.  The motivating theme has been proxemics … the study of the nature, degree, and effect of the spatial separation individuals naturally maintain (as in various social and interpersonal situations) and of how this separation relates to environmental and cultural factors Merriam-Webster.com… read more

In the RAW: an Alternative for Hartford

I. Prologue “The past is prologue.” True, but one cannot linger all one’s life over the introduction any more than one can linger too much over the art of the past. …  Such nostalgia only conceals a lack of sympathy with, a lack of knowledge of, or worse, panic over the now.  Art must always struggle to build onto the past, to break it down if necessary, to free itself from convention and rule as to create newly, vigorously, venturesomely with imagination and individuality. (Wagstaff 2-3) ~Sam Wagstaff When engaging my teenaged dance students in movement improvisation, I often encourage… read more

home: a place between

Tourists seek out new places.  In a new setting they are forced to see and think without the support of a whole world of known sights, sounds and smells—largely unacknowledged—that give weight to being …” ~Ti Fu Tuan, Space and Place During the summers of 2007 and 2008, I spent a total of 3 months on the island of Santiago in the Republic of Cape Verde, an archipelago 350 miles off the west coast of Africa.  I was there initially to collaborate with a team of teaching artists from both the United States and Cape Verde, and charged with the… read more

place is personal

The Invisible City Project Curatorial Statement Deborah Goffe, Curator I. Point of Reference All that confidence in continuous traditions and innocent encounters with pristine cultures has been shattered in our post-colonial epoch.  Borders bleed, as much as they contain.  Instead of dividing lines to be patrolled or transgressed, boundaries are now understood as crisscrossing sites inside the post-modern subject.  Difference is resituated within, instead of beyond, the self.  Inside and outside distinctions, like genres, blur and wobble (Conquergood 184). “ If place is home, and home is where the body is, then can we conclude that place is located or… read more