Come In, Make Art

Come In, Make Art

This past Friday I had a chance to spend some time with artists Ryan Seslow and Jeffrey Allen Price at their show, Energetic Fusion in the York College Art Gallery. The two have collaborated to create not just a show but an event, which involved them creating new work throughout its run as well as showing older work. But most importantly this show-as-open-studio invited all visitors to participate and create art with them. Here’s the first few lines of the description of the show:

Welcome, you are now a participant. It is our intention to activate the creative awareness of the York College Community. You may ask, what is your creative human potential? What can we learn from creatively collaborating with each other? What do we see and retain when there is a public display and means for collaborative creative expression?

The questions about learning from ‘creatively collaborating’ and having the ‘means’ to express this collaboration are really exciting to me as they remind me a lot of the questions DS106 is trying to answer. DS106 community has at it’s heart the goal to develop the ‘creative human potential’ using blogs for ‘public display’ and the ds106 site as a means to share work and foster collaboration.

It was so wonderful to find in this gallery basically an analog version of DS106 – so much energy, art, collaboration, sharing, and more.

Energetic Fusion Artists At Work

The first person I noticed when I walked in was a student working with a Dremel tool carving out her first wood cut for block printing. She later got help from another student as she used the block to make her first print.

A Student's First Wood Cut Students CollaborateFirst Wood Cut Print

Meanwhile both Ryan and Jeffrey were working on pieces in the gallery as well.

Ryan Seslow Painting in the Show Jeffery Allen Price At Work

There was tons of other activity going on which I tried to capture in this set of photos and I was able to talk with artists in the video below as well.

Ryan and Jeffrey thanks so much for allowing me to participate in your amazing art event, and I hope to get back in there next week and contribute some more work!

Comments

11 responses to “Come In, Make Art”

  1. Alan Levine (@cogdog) Avatar

    I love this concept- would like to think about ways ds1206 can transcend to the physical space of making art by hand like this. Plus I want to learn how to dremel.

  2. Ryan Avatar

    Great great stuff man!

  3. Ryan Seslow Avatar

    Digging this!

  4. mbransons Avatar

    @Alan I’ve got a dremel and will bring to faculty academy, some ds106 wood cuts would be crazy fun.

    @Ryan thanks again so much for having me at your killer show.

  5. Daniel Avatar

    Great work! Can’t wait to see the show when it is finished. Pretty epic work from our faculty and staff. I have lots of tools if you would like to borrow (Ahem.. a new kick-ass dremel)

    1. mbransons Avatar

      I can hear the high pitched whorl of the dremel cutting into wood now. So great.

  6. J.A.P. Avatar

    Michael, thanks for adding your energy and your work of art to our show. This is a great posting, thank you very much for documenting and chronicling our activities. I was happy to learn about your own DS106 project. Let’s find a way to work together at York again…

    1. mbransons Avatar

      Thanks Jeffrey. I hope we do find ways to collaborate. I’ve been tossing around some ideas with Ryan to do a York course using some DS106 like ideas. Let me know if you’d like to try it out as well. It would be really interesting to see what we can do with students through the open web and some York art courses, or even a collaboration across campuses for courses you teach.

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