Village Portraits - Project Statement

While at graduate school I took a class at Hampshire College called the Artist as Collector taught by Robert Seydal and Sura Levine.  We were given the semester to create a project that utilized some form of collecting as part of the work.  For the 3 years that I was in grad school my wife and I lived in the University of Massachusetts’ Graduate Student Housing Complex called North Village.  It was a small one-bedroom apartment with only 371 sq. ft.  Most of the tenants were employees of the University or graduate students many of whom were study abroad students from Asian or European nations.  The complex houses nearly 350 tenants.  Adjacent to North Village Apartments is Puffton Village Apartments, which is twice the size and houses nearly three times the students who are primarily undergraduate students.  Using cardboard collected from the various dumpsters and recycling sheds sporadically located at each of the apartment complexes I created scale models of typical one bedroom apartments at each of the respective sites.  The original surface imagery of the cardboard used was kept intact to act as artifact of the culture that discarded it.  When creating the piece I mainly tried to ignore the graphics on the cardboard, however there were times when I chose the location of certain graphics to create a satirical narrative (i.e. Slim Fast on the stairs, Southern Comfort on the interior wall).  While collecting the cardboard I kept a log of where each piece came from.  The maps and map key that accompany the project reflect this data.  My main intention behind the project was to create non-figurative portraits of the people and the cultures of the two neighboring villages that were informed by an archeological, Mark Dion-esque way of creating. The project since has been recycled.