Category Archives: Graphic Design

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Most Serene Republics (2007)

Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, (Cheyenne/Arapaho, 1954-)

This work was a temporary memorial for Native Americans who died in Italy as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in the late nineteenth century, and was installed at the Venice Biennale in 2007. It consisted of a series of 16 outdoor signs to remember and honor their loss, 8 outdoor signs that serve as commentary, several signs in the water-taxis encouraging repatriation of the Native people’s bodies from Europe to the U.S., as well as a large billboard at the Venice airport that stated ‘welcome to the spectacle, welcome to the show’ as a faux welcoming sign, which was visible as people walked through the airport check point. These Lakota warriors were formerly imprisoned in the U.S. and were given the choice to remain in prison, or go perform in Europe, which was not much of a choice.

Hui-min Tsen, The Pedway (2009-13)

brochure

published 2013 by Green Lantern Press | Specs: 18 pages, 4.2 x 0.2 x 9 inches

“Deep beneath the surface of the city, a tangled ribbon of corridors runs throughout 40 blocks of downtown Chicago. This meandering passage appears to have grown up organically as if it were an animal’s burrow or a donkey’s path.  Its route is illogical: the corridors exist outside of known space, and its hidden entrances lead to mysterious destinations. What is this place?  It is the Chicago Pedway, an intricate non-system of pedestrian tunnels built to separate the citizens of the city from the dangers and foul weather encountered on the street.

On the Trail of a Disorderly Future was an interdisciplinary project consisting of a walking tour of Chicago’s Pedway, ephemera given and sold to tour participants as souvenirs, and a book for a “self-guided” tour of the Chicago Pedway. The project told a story across 36 points-of-interest, weaving together mythic and historical tales to tell the story of urban development, utopian impulses, and fears of the city from the Renaissance until now.

Details: Active from 2009-2013 | performance (90-minute walking tour), ephemera (postcards, map, website), book” (credit)

Agatha Gothe-Snape, We all walk out in the end (2012/18)

“Walking connects our body to time and space whilst giving us time to survey place. Walking moves us surely, from one place to another. There is no guarantee, however, that the room we walk out of is any different to the one we walk into.” [from catalog, From Here to There: Australian Art and Walking]

Andrea Carlson, You Are on Potawatomi Land (2021)

Andrea Carlson presented a site-specific large-scale (15’x266’) installation along the Chicago Riverwalk entitled, You Are on Potawatomi Land (2021). The sheer scale of the work required walking to take in the full text: “Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék – You are on Potawatomi land,” and it was situated on a recognized public walking space. The site of the work is near the former sandbar in the Chicago River that lends its name to the Sandbar Decision, a US Supreme Court case that “denied the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi ownership of the unceded land that was built into the lake by settlers.” In Carlson’s words, this work is “… meant to reaffirm Native people where they live and where they seem invisible, which is often the case in urban environments.”


Credits: Lee, JeeYeun. “Don’t Look to My Work for Reconciliation”: A Conversation with Andrea Carlson,” Monument Lab. Accessed February 13, 2022: https://monumentlab.com/bulletin/dont-look-to-my-work-for-reconciliation-a-conversation-with-andrea-carlson

Kubra Khademi, Kubra & Pedestrian Sign (2016)

Live Performance by Kubra Khademi
16 Feburary 2016, Paris, France

“PE: When you moved to France, you continued to put on walking performances. For Kubra & Pedestrian Sign (2016) you walked through Paris in a black dress and high heels with a pedestrian crossing lightbox tied to the top of your head, except the green sign in the box was a female figure. I’m curious about how you found the experience of reclaiming public space in this new European context.

KK: The challenges are different here: the texture and sense of the landscape, the cityscape, the people around me. Public space in France and the Parisian art scene are still very masculine, but in a far more subtle and sophisticated way. No one harasses me in Europe like they do in Afghanistan. I don’t need an armor to walk here. The city is like that blank white page again. That was the first performance I put on in a public space after then one in the Kabul. It was a few months after I arrived. The image of me is almost funny. I was looking into people’s eyes and allowing them to talk to me. Most of the reactions were similar, but one woman screamed at me from the other side of the street, “That is sexist! Skirts are sexist!”” [credit]

Máiréad and Tim Robinson, Folding Landscapes (1972-)

a map

Tim Robinson “Oilerin Arann a map of the aran islands Co. Galway eire” (1996)

“Tim Robinson [1935-2020] is the alter ego of artist Timothy Drever whose abstract paintings and environmental installations were seen in a number of exhibitions in London before he moved to the west of Ireland in 1972. Robinson originally studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London.

He and his wife, Máiréad [1934-2020], [then lived] in Roundstone in Connemara, where, in 1984, they established Folding Landscapes, a specialist publishing house and information resource center dealing with three areas of particular interest around Galway Bay: the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara. The maps and accompanying books are beautifully drawn and meticulously researched, explaining, often for the first time, the derivation and meaning of hundreds of place names and representing a wide range of information about the region’s culture and landscapes.

[They] gained much of this information literally on the ground, walking with naturalists, historians, archaeologists and other specialist through the landscape. [Their] maps and books provide an invaluable guide for visitors to the region as well as nourishing community spirit by identifying the irreplaceable uniqueness of the local environment and history. Tim and Mairead also run Unfolding Ideas, an annual Colloquium Series for scholars, educators and artists to engage in public talks, small group discussion and workshops in Roundstone, Connemara.”

Rachael Clewlow “Explorer” 2011

[credit]

“Rachael Clewlow meticulously documents the ways in which she inhabits the city in which she lives: the routes she takes through it, the times and dates of her travels, and the methods by which (to paraphrase Warhol) she moves from A to B and back again.

Several of the artists in ‘Walk On’ use GPS technologies to monitor their own movements through space. Clewlow, by contrast, prefers what the writer Robert Macfarlane has punningly called “the old ways”: she keeps a series of “statistical diaries” in which routes, traditional pathways or not, are “logged, through dedicated, almost ritualistic daily recording”. These diaries are exquisite objects in their own right. They are also the source material for Clewlow·s pictorial inventions.

Like other artists here, Clewlow creates her own systems of translation by which the patterns of her own mobility become abstract patterns of form and color. She describes her process as “the organization and presentation of related data, accumulated over years” into abstract imagery which “recalls the visual language of maps and their color coding systems, though their graphic style belies the rigorous and precise handmade approach to making them”. Indeed, Clewlow plays with the idea that her works should be functional, deliberately making them lie on the borders of legibility. Her conceptual and material dexterity ensure that her works instigate journeys in our imaginations.”

Hamish Fulton, Melting Glacier (2005)

text over a photo of mountains

Melting Glacier, 2005, Archival inkjet print, 17 3/4 × 22 1/4 in. CREDIT: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hamish-fulton-melting-glacier

Like Richard Long, Hamish Fulton is a self-characterized “walking artist” who generates photographs, sketches, and text pieces based on the experience of each walk. During visits to South Dakota and Montana in the 1960s, Fulton decided that art should be about life, not about producing objects. Keenly interested in Native American cultures and Buddhist meditation practices, Fulton has walked in more than 25 countries in the past 30 years, including trips to the tops of Mount Everest and Denali. “If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art,” Fulton explains. “The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.”

[Credit above]


Credit below: Tate Britain’s Hamish Fulton: walking Journey

Since the early 1970s Hamish Fulton (born 1946) has been labelled as a sculptor, photographer, Conceptual artist and Land artist. Fulton, however, characterises himself as a ‘walking artist’.

Fulton first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of a number of artists – including Richard Long and Gilbert & George – who were exploring new forms of sculpture and landscape art. A central characteristic of their practice was a direct physical engagement with landscape. Fulton’s time as a student at St. Martin’s College of Art in London (1966-68) and his journeys in South Dakota and Montana in 1969, encouraged him to think that art could be ‘how you view life’, and not tied necessarily to the production of objects. He began to make short walks, and then to make photographic works about the experience of walking.

At this time, and subsequently, his practice was influenced by an unusually broad set of interests including the subject of the environment and the culture of American Indians. In 1973, having walked 1,022 miles in 47 days from Duncansby Head (near John O’Groats) to Lands End, Fulton decided to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.’ Since then the act of walking has remained central to Fulton’s practice. He has stated ‘If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art’ and has summed up this way of thinking in the simple statement of intent: ‘no walk, no work’. Although only Fulton experiences the walk itself, the texts and photographs he presents in exhibitions and books allow us to engage with his experience.