Point-to-Multipoint

This installation, titled Point-to-Multipoint, is the culmination of a month-long artist in residence program I was invited to participate in at the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina. Elsewhere is a museum and artist residency transforming a former second-hand store and its 60-year collection of material surplus. 

“The Collection” of objects in this 3 story former furniture, fabric, military surplus and thrift amassed by Sylvia Gray over her 60-years as proprietress of a second-hand store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.  When Sylvia passed, her grandson determined the materials become a collection and an archive, nothing would leave the space and nothing would be acquired. Instead, the collection would be the foundation for imagining a new world and collaborative model for creation. Elsewhere provides material and context for site-specific artistic experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration, and the archive is continually repurposed and re-imagined.

Point-to-Multipoint is the first full scale installation I ever executed. I wanted to use the language  of painting to address the complicated nature of communication and transportation systems. I was looking at several different systems local to Greensboro yet relevant to many communities across the country. I also integrated aspects of my studio research and inquiry prior to the residency in the work I made at the residency seamlessly. 

Networks are a collection of smaller entities working together to form a larger entity. Communication, transportation and the nervous system, for instance, all share ten characteristics inherent to "systems" ; they each contain senders, receivers, channels, transport, traffic/payload, security, signaling, scheduling,terminals and ancillaries. There are two main kinds of networks, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint. In point-to-point networks traffic moves from one node to another such as with roads and telephones. In point-to-multipoint networks traffic moves from a central hub that controls the flow of traffic to different nodes, ie.nodes are not directly connected and resources and information are mediated.

For my residency and installation I started looking at and mapping the spaces in the building that housed the residency and moved out into the neighborhood. Maps figured prominently in the final installation, additionally I was also very interested in finding objects that seemed to be about or spoke to moving through space. I looked for objects that could operate on multiple levels, symbolically and that would ultimately look like objects in a painting. I was offered the use of the main window display to execute my installation and I approached it as if I were creating a big three dimensional painting.

Images one and twelve establish a picture of the entire installation.

The other images are detail shots.

The last three images are some of the drawings that were made in part for the installation and as a stand alone exploration.