Funeral Shrouds and Architectural Ghosts

Collaborative installation: Stephanie, Kara, Zac, Megan, and Kim (me)

Stephanie, Zac, Megan, and Kara collectively chose an abandoned funeral home that they discovered during their scavenger hunt in Old North St. Louis. We decided to hold a memorial for the building, and we each created prints inspired by a specific aspect of funerals.

Note the solitary pew, and the massive heap of tires that appeared between our first and second visits.

In honor of the Victorian architecture of the mansion turned funeral home, Zac researched Victorian lifestyle and came across this lexicon of Victorian flower meanings. Zac, Stephanie, and I each chose a flower and created prints inspired by its meaning.

I chose lilacs, which represent beauty and pride.

Using images of lilacs, I carved a woodcut that I then tiled on rice paper to make a funeral shroud.

Veils and shrouds represent the barrier between life and death, as well a barrier in the way of understanding. They are part of both weddings and funerals, so the funeral shroud represents not only mourning but also the cycle of growth and decay. I wanted my prints to interact with the space in a hopeful way, memorialize the space's better days, and leave a prayer or spell for regeneration.

Once I saw the space, I was fascinated the textures and patterns in the decaying building and really wanted to hang my prints against the brick wall and peeling paint.

We were armed with several kinds of tape, paper towels, and 409, but the grimy walls defeated all of my hanging efforts. Everything fell down after about half a minute.

This worked out for the best, because when we assembled our work in a sculptural construction using found objects from the space, my prints functioned as a literal funeral shroud.

My prints mirrored elements of Zac's scattered apple blossoms and Stephanie's lily bouquet, but the variety of styles and colors schemes gave the installation the feeling of a shrine to the funeral home.

A closeup of Zac's flower cutouts next to my woodcuts.

Overall, our project turned out to be a very hopeful memorial.

As a followup to the piece, I salvaged a couple of old boards from the collapsed part of the building. When I was trying, to no avail, to tape my work to the wall, the tape took off all kinds of paint, dirt, and weird chalky stuff. I thought maybe I could make some prints using the grime already on the boards instead of using ink.

Look at the gunk on those walls!

So I got some paper and some spray adhesive and ran the boards through the press, which worked surprisingly well.

I'm particularly excited about the texture of these prints - the grain of the wood is embossed into the paper, and some splinters of wood and paint stuck to the adhesive.

The prints are ghostly and ethereal, and function something like death masks, commemorating the face of the building in death. The colors also remind me of ashes and cremation.

I'm really fascinated with this process and I think I'll continue to explore it in the future.

Old North Community Flags

-Intallation at Urban Studio Cafe


-Installation at the Community Garden

If you took flags and hung them up please share the messages you wrote on them, where you hung them, and an image if possible. Thanks for participating!

Closer Up:

home is where the _____ is

for my final installation in north st louis, i placed a pile of petal shapes on a found chair at the historical site of pruit igoe, which is considered one of the greatest failures in modern housing. the chair was found in a makeshift dwelling that exists on the site off cass avenue, by what is currently a power plant. on the petals are written excerpts from a list of personal memories of home, hopes of my future home, and the word "home". the following short video is an animation of the wind stirring and carrying the petals away. this project was a way to respond on a personal level to a rich historical site filled with social and political implications. my personal meditation on the concept of home is able to touch the surface of a home destroyed, and further, the history of those who had lived there.





this installation came about through a previous and more laborious process of printing a series of etchings, in which the petal shape lives as handwriting and an embodiment of form and color.



-katie osburn

Disquiet Mindscape

Collaborative Project: Kristin Fleischmann & Alana Fields

Alana and I focused our project on racist and sexist/ gender motivated hate crimes at St. Louis University. We viewed the current events as a microcosm for the larger St. Louis metropolitan area. We researched recent crimes, attended a vigil/ rally at St. Louis University, and spoke with students and administration in order to complete our project. We brought together two activism and poetry in an installation of printout on SLU's campus.

Materials/ Prints:
Alana Prints: Pronto Plates, Hand Rolled Color
Kristin Prints: Watercolor silkscreen, Acryclic, Pencil
All prints were turned into xerox copies, 11 x 17 and stacked on top of painted, white boxes.

Vigil/ Rally at SLU



Install at SLU

Appropriation

Moss Graffiti

Check out this lovely form of natural graffiti:




http://www.storiesfromspace.co.uk/data/html/mossgraffiti.html

Fun Facts For All You Graffitti Lovers

Wheatpaste (also known as potato paste, flour paste, rice paste, Marxist glue, or simply paste) is a liquid adhesive made from vegetable starch and water. It has been used since ancient times for various arts and crafts such as book binding, decoupage, collage, and papier-mâché. It is also made for the purpose of adhering paper posters to walls and other surfaces (often in graffiti). Closely resembling wallpaper paste, it is often made by mixing roughly equal portions of flour and water and heating it until it thickens. A similar flour and water formula is taught in elementary school minus the low heat simmer as an easy substitute for ready-made adhesive.

In the fine arts, it is often used in preparation and presentation, due to its low acidity and reversibility.

Activists and various subculture proponents often use this adhesive to flypost propaganda and artwork. It has also commonly been used by commercial bill posters since the nineteenth century. In particular, it was widely used by nineteenth and twentieth century circus bill posters, who developed a substantial culture around paste manufacture and postering campaigns.[1] In the field of alcohol and nightclub advertising, in the 1890s, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters were so popular that instructions were published on how to peel down the pasted posters without damage.[2] Until the 1970s, commercial poster hangers always "cooked" their own paste, but since then many have bought pre-cooked instant pastes.[3] It is applied to the backside of paper then placed on flat surfaces, particularly concrete and metal as it doesn't adhere well to wood or plastic. Cheap rough paper, such as newsprint, works well, as it can be briefly dipped in the mixture to saturate the fibres. Due to danger of being apprehended, wheatpasters frequently work in teams or affinity groups. In the USA and Canada this process is typically called "wheatpasting" or "poster bombing," even when using commercial wallpaper paste instead of traditional wheat paste. In Britain the term for the verb "wheatpasting" is "flyposting."

Secret Ballot #5: Dead tie

Old North: Google Map

View Old North St. Louis in a larger map

Scavenger Hunt Hot Spots

View 2700 N 14th St in a larger map

Losing Control

My dystopia was constructed around the idea of loosing control.

As an experiment in loosing control I had people in my life pick outfits out for me for a day. I could not control the image that the outfits presented, the way people interpreted this image, and even in someways the way this image changed my behavior.

These are the outfits that my mom and then 2 roommates Monica and Liz picked for me (respectively)


During the experiment I was interested in how I felt because of my clothing, and what I thought other people thought of me. I was very conscious of what others projected onto me because of my clothes.

I honed in on how so many important choices about my identity were flattened into the choice of how I presented myself. Flattened, like a paper doll.

Thinking about how projecting identity through the image communicated with clothing is portrayed as a specifically female preoccupation, I started to question,
What makes women worried about their image...or who?
What role do men play in womens' issues with body image?

In response, I tried to visually capture the unsettling questions that this experience made me I made me ask by creating magnetic paper dolls of myself and this experience, vulnerable and flat. I brought them to my boyfriends apartment, put them on his fridge and documented him playing with them.

3, 5

3. rearrange bricks in a creative way and leave them like that

5. make a stack of ocks marking a thing/place of interest

13

13. Go Gordon Matta Clark on that house

7

7. Team Members in a Tree

15

15. Fix something

19

19 find a place that fits with a song lyric: Beck "Mattress." Golden Leftovers

2

2. Spell the phrase "built environment" from found words/letters

20

20. Be in two places at once

18

18. record a conversation with the natives

12

12. find something that burned

1.

1. perspective picture