Occupying the (Un)Space: Union Station (as) Studio, project duration: approximately 500 hours, A site specific counter-occupation of public space by the artist: Re-purposing the grounds of Union Station and surrounding public transit routes as an inclusive, interactive “art studio,” laboratory, performance space, and classroom; intent on collapsing the distance between making and viewing, performer and audience, teacher and student; creating highly intimate and sometimes “invisible” spaces of both personal and collective liberatory cultural production., 2011-2012
About This Project : As someone who has relied solely on public transportation for most of my adult life, it has always been necessary that I adapt my art practice to this material circumstance. I spend a great deal of time on bus benches, walking, negotiating layovers and —for better or worse, encountering some dynamic personalities. Union Station has become a nucleus for my travels throughout the city as my migrations always intersect at this middle territory. I can often be found sitting in a leather chair in the big airy waiting room, looking over notes, reading, observing the space, or making drawings. Working in these spaces provides valuable information that inevitably emerges in my work as the residue of hours spent in close quarters with strangers. I have always valued that these kinds of public spaces provide a simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, illuminating the subtle poetics of the daily-lived life in its most beautiful and brutal forms. Union Station offers a rare geographical moment when multiple and often contradictory ways of being intersect as people with complex identities and varying degrees of privilege and marginalization move through the space toward a similar goal: to get to or to go from. read more…
kristy lovich 