What's your 12 X 12?

“What’s your

12 x 12?” 

What can you

“not-live-without”?

To spark new thinking around what smart consumption means for each person, Lucy Blake-Elahi, the final artist in the 12x12 at the Queens Botanical Garden will make 12 drawings in response to this question and encourages you to participate with your own list and/or drawings of 12 (or fewer!) “can’t do withouts”.  

On Saturday, July 27, and Sunday, July 28, from 12:00pm to 6:00pm, 12x12 Project artist in residence Shawn Chua will be performing a durational piece in which he will be sitting on a chair suspended by a web of twine. Over the course of the week, he has been building an environmental installation in which chairs, tables, frame, light bulb, a pair of scissors, words, plants, and himself are entangled in a maze of twine. The ends of each 400 feet twine will be bound to different parts of my body, so that when people navigate through the installation, when they inevitably tug on the strings, it will also be pulling on him. Everything in the room is suspended in the web of twine, balancing precariously, vibrating with the wind and the engagement of participants. The twine manifests the fibrous connections and kinship between humans and plants, as he enacts a continuity between the environment and himself, embodying the affect of the surrounding plants/objects/persons. The twine is also a continuous line that traverses through the various entities in the ecology, metamorphosizing from the stem of a plant, to the wire of a bulb, to the stroke of a character, to the veins of his body, to the synapses of his brain. It is a network that connects not only the organic to the inorganic but also the material to the immaterial - ideas (in the form of quotes) also belong to this ecosystem, affecting and being affected by the twine. He is meditating on the animistic belief system of the Ojibwa, who regard plants as "other-than-human persons," using Matthew Hall's ideas of plant personhood to bring plants within the realm of human moral consideration. Hopefully, participants will reflexively become more sensitive to the animate beings of plant-persons and the delicate ecological balance, reflecting on ways to enact relationships of care, humility and responsibility to mitigate our violence in this fragile space. Ultimately, as he inhabits plant personhood, he questions what it means to be a person - not as an autonomous entity, but as a dependent ecological being.

Tomaz Azevedo Capobianco began his artist residency program in unusual fashion today by performing a pilgrimage - walking all the way from his apartment in Harlem to the Queens Botanical Gardens. This is all part of his artistic and spiritual vision as he embarks on his project. 

As he tells the 12x12 Project team, 

"While leaving an invisible trace throughout the 10 miles that separate my apartment from the Botanical Garden, I will collect vestiges left by other inhabitants who have crossed my planned path. By beginning my residency outside the studio space, I intend to recuperate the Maurice Merleau-Ponty inquiry on the existential condition of space and the spatial condition of existence.  What are the actual dimensions an artwork? Where does it begin? Where does it end? My daily commutes will be an integral part of the work, an exploration of the porosity of the Botanical Garden boundaries. Throughout the week the items collected outside will culminate in an architectural transformation of the 12X12 studio."

Visit the Queens Botanical Gardens this week, Tuesday to Sunday, from 8am to 6pm to see Tomaz in the 12x12 installation and witness this visionary artist at work. 

For more information, contact Brendan at [email protected]