A short piece by local writer Nathan Filbert, inspired by the exhibition production process:


Art: Lay(er) it on me


Art is often experienced as artifact: products, performances and displays – events of encounter with created things.

Yes “artists” leave residue and results, constructions and experiences, but most often think of art as their activity, not something manufactured. 


Too often “Art” rather than being seen as a continuous process, a way of being for humans interacting with available mediums that sometimes leave traces as static objects, recordings and things – instead is treated as two nearly independent states:  Process and Product.


Artifact, performance, display…actuated productivity…NOT how it happens.


Sound comes forth through the movements of hands, vibrations over vocal chords, synapses in the brain, intuitions and innovations – electronics, apparatus, instruments and interactions…


Lay(er) it on me.


Taking in images playing on a screen – cross-cuts and pans, dolly shots and pitch – think video (“to see on the pattern of audio”) or film (some signified membrane) – the product is a trace and an encryption of accident and craft, difficult work and talent and play – levity and gravity.


Paintings on a wall, inscriptions in a book, songs crooned, photographs framed…all of them a kind of record – tokens of interactions and engagements, dedication and often desperate necessities…art happens in the making…


Lay(er) it on us.


Art HAPPENS BETWEEN an embodied and enminded human extending and expressing - combining energy and matter : it is no more inside the artist as it is an aspect of a medium (a quality of paint or canvas, possibility of sound or light, latent form in stone or wood, etc.).  It is Process AND (sometimes) Product, Project. 


In other words, don’t fetishize WHAT happens…

rather be involved with its happening, happen-with in what John Dewey so aptly elucidated as Art as Experience…


  1. •Process the projects

  2. •Project the process

  3. •Participate and become

Lay(er)ing it on.