TECHNICIAN’S NOTES
I moved into this huge apartment with numbers over the doors. I felt strange taking up all that space by myself. I certainly didn’t want to fill it all up with stuff - already there’s a room full of crates and old projects, a studio, an office, a bedroom - had to make sure one room stayed completely empty of decor. Before moving here, I’d started growing all these trees just to see if I could. Trees and food - everything I ate, if it had a seed I’d plant it. Stuff grows whether you know what you’re doing or not, the seeds assert themselves. So, I decided to dedicate a room to the trees. But I really couldn’t stand it, I was going into the room all the time to look at the changing trees and I wanted others to see how cool they were too. The only way to express the slowness and the assertion of these trees was to have people spend time with them.
This said, I also saw a need for a local retreat for artists. Unlike a curator or a gallery space which focuses on product, I wanted to activate a space in people’s heads - a type of parenthesis. In this way, I spread the word that I was starting a residency in my apartment. In response to all the questions of how, why, and what I would offer, I came up with the mandate to give the project enough structure to be taken seriously and enough leeway to take its own shape. Many people expressed interest but it wasn’t until I pushed them to book dates that things started to happen.