Project 1: Process

My Process Art project begins by looking at Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms, in which he laid out thousands of found items from near his home in New York and from a protected California coastal area in which all manner of junk and debris collects from the Pacific. The items are laid out on the ground in a large rectangle and on a raised viewing surface, organized by color and material, ranging from natural objects like stones and shells to manufactured objects such as lightbulbs, construction helmets, buoys, bottles in glass and plastic, and unidentified pieces of plastic, glass, and metal. I connect to Asterisms on the level of being a collector of seashore debris, with a semi-organized collection of seaglass, shells, and manufactured bits. The environmental aspect is inescapable, but I’d like for the viewer to interpret that on their own. Collecting and organizing are impulses I feel on a regular basis and to put that impulse and the satisfaction of having done so into a process piece seems like a natural course to take.

The process of the project starts at low tide, when the beach in front of E Fishers Road by the boathouse is exposed. I’ve known this beach to have an excess of broken glass. With a person standing at one end of the beach with a camera, I will pick up a piece of glass, put it in a bucket or bag, and walk to the next piece, repeat the process.After washing all the pieces to get only the dirt off, not any barnacles or algae, I will organize them by color first, then lay them out on tables pushed together to form as much surface as I need or can manage, or on the floor, possibly on large sheets of rolled paper. In organization by color (probably brown, green, and white, as they’re the most common), they’ll also be organized by size. The video of the collection will be played while the organized installation can be viewed.

The processes of collecting, cleaning, and collecting found items are actions I commit regularly for myself. By doing it on a larger scale while recording, the process takes on more time, effort, and output than my personal projects, and can be perceived as an environmentally political statement. While I will be fulfilling the impulse to collect and organize from nature, I may also be taking responsibility for my shortcomings as a consumer of industry and manufacturing, as I am partially at fault for the glass being there. That is my emotional interpretation of the project, but I don’t wish to project any emotion into the piece, and let the viewers feel that for themselves.