the contact project in an age of much disconnect, we encourage touch.

CONTACT MEETS HAFNY

CONTACT’s Legacy Russell and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in conversation — click HERE to tune in.

CONTACT MEETS BOMB

CONTACT’s Legacy Russell has been appointed the new Art Editor for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBlog. Check out her recent post by clicking HERE.

Open Call — American Idolatry

Artists Wanted for American Idolatry: A Recession Art Show
Recession Art
(New York NY)

From October 29-November 6, American Idolatry will transform the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn into a house of worship. Throughout the week, the public will be invited to view artworks and performances, and partake in evening educational programming, as curated by Legacy Russell and a diverse team of up-and-coming artists, academics, and cultural producers — the future of creative America.

American Idolatry will make use of physical action, installation, and experimentation in all media to assert spaces of shrine-like religious artifice that, though constructed, will strive to function as “real” sites of idolatry, worship, and remembrance of America as influenced by pop culture aesthetic and contemporary politic. Whether displayed independently or as part of a greater assemblage, shrines take a multitude of forms, and material objects are socio-cultural unifiers and signifiers—they hold memories, they have the capacity to provoke emotion, and they imbue one with a sense of belonging, a sense of history. Thus, a shrine and the actions that accompany its presence are not only a portrait of their maker, but also a reflection of the complex global culture surrounding us.

Submissions are open to artists working in all media. Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Legacy Russell and Art Director Ani Katz.  

The deadline for entries is Monday June 27, 2011. The submission fee is $20. Artists will be notified of acceptance by early August.

Website: http://recessionartshows.com/submit

The Poetics of the Random: Snapshots of Little Haiti and the Questions of the Earthquake

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

Through this, the only lens I have, and by meditatively mapping socio-political relationships, anecdotal histories and the ever prophetic fact of a snapshot I want to talk to you about Little Haiti and I want to talk to you about human life.

Little Haiti is a neighborhood in the city of Miami. It has been a first stop and a new home for many Haitian immigrants who have come to America seeking relief from a series of civil wars and natural disasters. Within it’s borders a unique compromise between American resources and technology and Haitian culture and ritual has flourished. While the neighborhood was once rife with gangs and drug trade there has been a relative calm in the last few years, a calm that has been, not incidentally, mirrored in the country of Haiti.

Earlier this winter I spent two months in Little Haiti, Miami taking photographs. It has been a terrible and unfathomable happenstance that only two weeks after I returned to New York City, the country Haiti has been devastated by an earthquake, the outcome of which has yet to be fully comprehended.

So what does this mean for Haiti? For the neighborhood of Little Haiti? For the Caribbean and for America?

Part of the despair at this Disaster is the fact that Haiti, as the poorest Caribbean country, has for many years suffered political instability and an unrelenting succession of natural disasters. This Earthquake seems to many a final and fatal blow in a string of unfortunate events. There is an impulse to ask “Why Haiti?”

I would like to think this event, rather than a curse, is part of the random and inexplicable patterns of our world and the ways that forces lacking reason and driven by chance are responsible for the building and the undoing of nations, culture and lives.

Little Haiti is to me the embodiment of the beneficent nature of the random. Its existence is testament to the construction of new and unique culture: part shrine to Haiti, part Miami utopia, part ghetto. Stray dogs, kittens, roosters and chickens roam the narrow streets of the neighborhood with a sense of purpose. Priestesses tend to Botanica (Voodoo) shops. Mothers drag their kids to school on the bus. There is a Footlocker. There is a Wendys with bulletproof glass. There is a van selling sugarcane. Young men speed heisted sports cars with no plates. Old men play their dominoes for hours. Young girls walk dutifully home, homework in hand. From 4pm on, the neighborhood comes alive as the many generations of Haitian immigrants and Haitian-Americans living or working or visiting in the neighborhood come outside.

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

While at first glance there might seemingly be more Haiti to Little Haiti then America, it is most certainly a unique reflection upon Haiti and America both, rather than a twin of its namesake. In stores, on dashboards, on mantles in people’s homes, objects and images side by side told the story of the intersections of culture inherent in the story of America and in the story of immigration. Little Haiti existed as a loose sketch of Haiti, but unquestionably an American revision.

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

The degrees of intentionality of the aesthetic juxtapositions the neighborhood overflows with begs a larger question of Nation, of the currents of Diaspora and of America: if our homes and our worlds are composed of collections of the things we are able to keep, to bring with us vs. the things we have left behind, discarded, to what extent is the construction of culture serendipitous?

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

Now, post-earthquake, Little Haiti exists in many ways in memorial; monument to the structures that inspired it that have been leveled to the ground. While it still stands to be seen how much of Haiti is in-tact, Little Haiti exists as a love letter to a Port Au Prince that no longer stands.

There is human consequence in discussions of the random occurrence and the random object also. Beyond the poetics of Diaspora there is tragedy and loss.

I think of a woman who invited me into her home and showed me photos of her son. There were many photos of him around her house, on the coffee table on top of the counter. In each of the images the son was but 12 although she told me he was in fact my contemporary: forced to flee for her life to the U.S. due to her political involvement in Haiti she had not seen her son for 9 years.

I pray that he and many others are safe.

(copyright Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich)

When the international relief effort in Haiti has done it’s job, when the bodies have all been accounted for, when those who must grieve have begun to grieve, when sleeves have been rolled up and wallets opened and debris cleared and towed away, when boats upon boats of haitians have left for a new life in America, in the Bahamas, in Dominican Republic, when Haitians have stayed in Haiti with a faith and a hope to rebuild their country the question will be asked what to rebuild, what to restore - what to keep and what to leave behind?

Is there any comfort in the fact that this question is the very definition of Diaspora? Does it make any difference that this process of selection and of re-valuing is one that defines human history and cultural identity?

Maybe in time this can be accepted as part of the luckless forces within this life. Who knows. For now, with thousands of people buried underneath a fallen city, there is simply too much work to do.

- Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich