#projectspace2920

Eagle Nebula, janet e. dandridge: Ritual Portals at the Mezzanine ONE NIGHT ONLY - Saturday, February 6, 2016 | 8:30pm - 10:30pm Performance at 9:00pm 

A Conversation with Photographer Glen Wilson - Part 2

PS2920:   Tell me about the first gate you saw and how did you know you wanted this gate and what you were going to do with it.

GW: The idea came to me, a few years ago, talking across the fence with my neighbor Aron Dafney. Before he passed, we enjoyed many hours of conversation sitting up on his porch as he puffed his pipe, and listened to the blues radio station. He shared stories about his own past, leaving Texarkana with his wife in the early 1950's for California, and their eventual arrival to Venice Beach. His stories provided glimpses and context of our neighborhood in the years before I arrived with my own family. Aron and I also shared an affinity for collecting, and keeping objects and items, old tools, doors, lumber, etc.. He passed along his old chain link gate to me, which became the first gate I wove for this series. The other gates, I have salvaged from homes which were subsequently demolished, or in other cases condemned as in some gates from New Orleans. PS2920:   Are there any "gates" you'd like access to? Or would like to cross the threshold of? If so, which ones?

GW: Growing up in the midwest, gates and fences were seldom true barriers. Accessibility became more of an issue of navigation. Once one becomes aware of the obstacle, it then must be negotiated. For example, my friends and I knew that certain gates remained permanently locked, and thus they might need to be hopped. Others fenced in dogs, so we needed finesse, timing, and speed on our side in those situations, if we wanted to try a shortcut. Gates and fences were just fixed points useful in mapping the terrain of neighborhood. Clearly, gates function both literally and figuratively to divide spaces and keep some in and others out. There is a rich discussion to be had around this, particularly when it comes to the economic and social forces of gentrification.

Glen Wilson: Gatekeeping presents the most recent works in an evolving series of photo-assemblages that artist Glen Wilson has begun to exhibit in project spaces, galleries, and public spaces. Over many years, Wilson, whose roots are in documentary photography, has roamed his Venice Beach neighborhood photographing the rapid changes it is undergoing due to gentrification.  Amid the debris of neighborhood demolition sites, where modest homes and bungalows that represent vintage Venice residential architecture once stood, Wilson has continued to photograph and recently begun to salvage objects, specifically, entry gates of chain-link fence systems. 

A Conversation with Photographer Glen Wilson - Part 1

PS2920: What does the gate represent and why is it important to your work? Or at least this series? Why chain-link gates? Why not picket fence gates or wooden gates?

GW: The gates are vestiges of homes and neighborhoods, the places where they have stood, and functioned or lived, for decades in most cases, as thresholds or points of transition. Constantly engaged, they become objects of everyday ritual, a part of what Bachelard calls 'the poetics of space'. The medium of chain-link is particularly interesting to me as it represents a kind of fabric where form, function, and economic threads become interwoven. Chain-link gates and fences are designed for simple effective function, are not particularly ornamental, though ornamentation and customization do present themselves. They exist in a screen-like, almost invisible plane without losing function. They signal working and middle class economic realities in that they are solid, affordable, function to project a kind of barrier, while maintaining transparency and permeability. This style of fencing proliferated beginning in the 1940's (in an industrial context), and now defines and outlines so many boundaries throughout the world, as to be among the most prevalent material objects we encounter and negotiate on an everyday basis. In a sense, as objects, the gates are witness to the rhythms of places, and they help punctuate those rhythms. They interact with the elements, weathering, co-mingling the human and atmospheric conditions that characterize a place.

The gates carry multiple meanings. First, they define and demarcate, spaces of transition and passage. They are active, they swing and articulate, through the wincing squeaks, clinks and clanks of their hinges and clasps. They locate a ritualized act of movement, to and from, announce transitions, arrival and departure between private and public, yard and street. They represent flow. The meanings of gates, what they may be said to represent, are as dynamic and shifting as the ritual movements and fleeting paces of folks who together constitute the idea of neighborhood. Neighborhood is never fixed, it is contested. Neighborhood is flux, the space of the gate is the intersection between the flux of the sidewalk or street, and the perceived stability and intimacy of home. The gates are an ever present part of that flow, a part of the circulation of a neighborhood.

PS2920: Gates, like doors, represent points of entry and exit. They may also suggest access, a transition, or a passageway; moving between places literally or metaphorically. What is the relationship between these metaphors and the images you choose to weave into the gates? GW: Shifting and moving between places – that dynamic, that negotiation – the dialectics of inside/outside, presence/absence, closeness/distance, etc. has always been intrinsic to my practice. As an artist rooted in documentary photography, the fluidity and dynamism of identity and community is a typically present in my work. The dynamics of spaces and places, the ways in which the feeling of a place can swing or shift, subtly or dramatically, over the course of just a few footsteps is especially familiar to the artist who works in the street.

Collin Stafford, Becky Stafford, von curtis and Ofelia Marquez Monster Mash

2920 W. Florence Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90043

April 24 - May 3, 2015

Closing reception: 6-9pm  Closing performance: 8pm

Project Space 2920 is proud stream #Blkgrrrl’s live reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God from 3:00pm - 4:00pm on Saturday, April 11, 2015.  Don’t miss the Tall Art Girl Collective reading at 11:00am! _______________________________________________________________________