Artist Statement?

Dear Registrar,

I have chosen to write my artist’s statement in the form of a letter to you. It is one of a series of letters that I wrote and displayed in my project to all of the people who have helped determine the course of the work I have done this year. You have asked me explain to you exactly what my project is, and also want to tell you what role Bard has played in it. I know that my letter is going to be longer than you asked my artist statement to be, and I hope this won’t upset you too much. My work this year has been against the idea of self-editing, I want to make as much apparent to the viewer as possible, and so I want to tell you everything I think is relevant. You can skim the letter, if you want. It won’t upset me.

I believe that we are living today in an increasing moment of ecological crisis, and that as a young person it is appropriate, maybe even necessary, to feel panicked. I began the year with this anxiety, believing that there must be a way for my artistic process to further my understanding of why I find the larger systems that control today’s world to be so upsetting. I wanted my artwork to be a means to synthesize the disparate ways ecological crisis affects my life. I wanted to embody all the daily decisions I make to try to explicate myself from systems I think are wrong, all the academic learning about ecology that had played such a larger role in my experience at bard, and the personal, emotional work of facing a planet in crisis. Early in the year, it became apparent to me that these ambitions were impossible to fulfill- the work of synthesizing ones personal, academic and creative lives is not a project with an end. Thus, I came to see my senior project as a series of attempts, a collection of projects that collectively represent a yearning to know the planet and my place within it. I chose to work in my studio, making all of the necessities of my creative life part of the project. This minimized the amount of time I had to spend making my ideas in to finished objects, and maximized the amount of exploration and learning. This choice stems from my belief that art is essentially an act of self-education; a way in which a person learns to set an agenda for themselves that synthesizes the logistics of the material world and their intellectual, emotional and/or aesthetic interests. I wanted my project to be a testing of the ways in which I believe art has unique potential to be used in ecological pedagogy. Essentially, I spent the year as a test subject for my own educational theories

I divided my studio in to six rooms over two stories, and made each space in to a project or set of projects that helped me to deepen my understanding of how I am complicit in today’s ecological crisis. Here is a description and explanation of the rooms, called by the names I’ve refer to them by all year.

The Port was an entryway, which by the time of the opening was entirely empty. This was the space where things stay until they have another place, like any real port. I call this space a port to remind myself, jokingly, that my studio life is not separate from the problematic institution of international trade. Like all other places where humans live and work, my studio is a place that depends on a vast set of resources. The ceiling of this room was covered with paper bags hung upside-down. They were meant to evoke a sense of urgency, and to introduce the audience to the accumulation that will fill the rest of the piece

The Trash Room was a small room filled with cardboard boxes floor to ceiling, in which I stored and sorted all of the things I would have put in the trash and recycling since September. There were also two video monitors in the boxes- one playing a video of me emptying out my compost all year, and the other of me engaging with every light switch and electrical outlet I come in to contact with in my daily life. This project was the idea I began the year with, from which the rest of the project evolved.

The Office functioned as one would expect an office to, with a desk and chair for me, some small sets of shelves, a clothes rack and a comfortable chair for visitors. This is the space where I checked my e-mail, made small drawings, and wrote in my senior project blog, which can be found at statetheproblem.blogspot.com. On two walls of the room, I drew a large flow chart that connected all of my strains of thinking for the year. It included an exploration of the bad social systems I am complicit in, the things I consume and throw away, and the events of my life that led me to make this project. Another wall housed rough drafts for this flow chart and other texts that inspired it, and the fourth wall was built entirely out of newspaper collected from the red hook recycling center.

The Bunker was a glorified closet, housing all the things I needed to build the project, but not often enough merit keeping them in my office, as well as all of the other things in my life that I hold on to based on some ambiguous feeling that they will be useful in the future. I used this collection as a way to explore in myself the tendency we all have to try to stave off our fears by surrounding ourselves with objects . Because the room consisted of things that I thought needed in the future, but not actually once the project is complete, it was locked, but a peephole was provided for viewers to experience my collection.

The Altars Room was a deep red room with a cushy floor made of old clothing arranged in color order, which I believe to be the most beautiful thing I know how to make. Around the edge of the room were small tables, at which I wrote letters to all of the people who influenced the direction of this project: friends, family, professors, famous artists and thinkers, and even a few objects such as my car and my power drill. I wrote these letters as an exercise in articulating sources- to make clear to myself and my viewers that the making of this work of art did not happen in a vacuum, but rather exists within the context of my life and thus of the world. For those viewers who had letters written to them, it doubled as a way to re-focus the experience of my piece from that of a passive observer to one of a knowing participant. The letters serve as an acknowledgement that inevitably, when a viewer knows the artist, we process the piece as being about the artist, and so my viewers- friends, family and the bard population at large- will inevitably see the piece as being about me.

The Library housed the collection of books I read, or wish I’d read as part of the making of this project. It is a physical bibliography of the project, and a space for continued learning for myself and the viewer. The rest of the room- floor, walls, ceiling, furniture, was entirely made of plastic bags. I chose this material because it is the easiest to amass of all post-consumer wastes. Almost everyone uses them, and almost everyone saves them. It is one of the most blatantly thoughtless norms of American consumption. The challenge of collecting thousands of bags asked me to interface with many people in the bard and red hook community, bringing them in to my project and forcing me to articulate my agenda to many different types of people.

Bard has played a critical role in shaping me in to the person who desired to make this project. The education I have received here-inside the classroom, extracurricularly, through my involvement in the Trustee Leadership Scholar Program, and in my friendships here has problematized the aspirations to be a sculptor that I entered Bard with, and called in to question my most basic assumptions about my role in the world as a person of extreme privilege- a white, American woman with a great deal of education and wealth. Bard has taught me to see the flaws that exist with this institution, which leaves me feeling cynical about the school, but also grateful. My senior project has absolutely been the capstone of my learning process here, the synthesis of many of my academic, creative and personal aspirations. With it completed, I begin the scary work of making a life for myself outside of the comfortable context of this institution. I am very conscious of the fact that my identity and this year of art work that has come out of me have been shaped by the series of opportunities this school has provided me. Thank you for facilitating that.

Sincerely,
Rachel Schragis