sarah.ross
NOW
Aug. 7- Sept. 4, 2010: Come over to Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago to see "Hey, We're All Beginners Here", organizied by Mike Wolf. I've contributed a new project for the show titled "Experiments in Struggle".
Please come out for a special screening on Sept. 3, at 8pm. We'll have a conversation about recent setbacks and successes in organizing around prison reform in Illinois. Lori Jo Reynolds of Tamms Year Ten will be there to share their recent struggles.
"Siting Expositions: Vancouver" was included in a book titled "Stories in Reserve" by Temporary Travel Office. The project is a collaboration with Lize Mogel and Ryan Griffis; we explored False Creek, an area of Vancouver that was developed by two global, mega-events-- the 1986 World's Fair and the 2010 Winter Olympics. To get a copy of this project, map, audio tour or the Stories in Reserve book, see TTO website!
June 22-26 2010: Compass participants gave a workshop at the 2nd ever U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, MI. The workshop, titled "Cartography with Your Feet" explored the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor and made visible connections we have in the region and globe. On the way there, we met up with residents of the Black Oaks Center-- another amazing example of how people are spending time in a place and building relationships for a different kind of living.
For more images from the workshop and USSF activites, see my flickr page.
Jan. 29, 2010: I've co-organized a show with Steven Lam at SPACES Gallery, opening Jan. 29. Stick around for a workshop by Benj Gerdes on Jan 30. See documentation below and on Flickr!
Here's a bit of info on show:
The Jan. 2010 exhibition at SPACES, "...in a most dangerous manner", features artworks, publications, screenings and discussions that question how ‘economic crises’ have often been instrumentalized to restore divisions in class and power. Curated by Steven Lam and Sarah Ross, the exhibition examines the current economic conditions not as a crisis, a temporal anomaly, nor a failure in governmental regulations, but rather a cycle of speculative overtures that are common in the evolution of global financial markets. With contributions by an international roster of artists, "...in a most dangerous manner" exhibits work that name and locate the various physical and material sites that have been invested, degraded, and subsequently contaminated by a culture of market driven speculation.
Aritsts: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Julia Christensen, Elaine Gan, Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida, Lize Mogel, Claire Pentecost, Ohio University School of Art Critical Regionalism Initiative, Katya Sander, and Allan Sekula.
Essays by: Jeremy Beaudry and Meredith Warner, Gifford Hartman, Jennifer Hayashida, Brian Holmes, Yates McKee, Shiri Pasternak and Rebecca Zorach
2009
Oct. 1, 2009: A group of 11 of us-- for now known as the Compass Group-- have work in the Heartland exhibition at University of Chicago's Smart Museum. The show runs from Oct. 1.- January 17; the exhibition catalogue will be available in Fall of 2009. Our contribution to the show will also be featured in AREA's issue #9 edited by Dan Wang and Rebecca Zorach. If you'd like a free copy of this map (you'll get to see the other side!) go to the show, or e-mail me.
Sept. 15-28, 2009: I'll be in Kuopio, Finland, participating in the ANTI Contemporary Arts Festival. I'll be making new works which will be used in the City of Kuopio. All of the projects in this festival take place throughout the city. Check out the ANTI website for more details. Check back here for info on the work after Sept.
Sept. 17, 2009: Actions: What You Can Do With The City is traveling to Chicago! It will open Sept. 17 at the Graham Foundation. If you missed the show in Montreal, come see it in the Midwest! It will close at the end of January.
Sept: 11, 2009: I don't have anything to do with this show other than promoting it to you! It's going to be fabulous! so be sure to check out Everybody: Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009 at I Space in Chicago. This show is organzied by Bonnie Fortune and it's gonna rock!
Check out Block by Block's first projects! Block by Block Cooperation is a group of neighbors interested in neighborhood experiments. We hosted a seed swap and now BBB neighbor Sam Vandergrift is tapping about 30 of our street's maple trees! The syrup will be used for a street-pancake breakfast. Check the site for more summer activities.
Interested in spatial politics, geography, planning and the like? Check out the City from Below Conference, hosted in Baltimore this year. I'll be there with Sarah Lewison, Ryan Griffis, Brett Bloom, and Claire Penecost. We're hosting a panel entitled "The Region from Below" and will be talking about the MRCC's summer travels and our regional research thus far. 
Students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon have created a really great week of programming for this year's RAW! I'll be there March5-7, giving a workshop using the InAction Units. The students are also organizing an show titled "Subprime". See the Reed Arts Week schedule here: RAW
Check out Testing Resistance and Archisuits in Actions: What You Can Do With the City at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal . The show opens November 26 in the Main galleries. Actions "is an exploration of how everyday human actions can animate and influence the perception and experience of contemporary cities. Seemingly common activities such as gardening, recycling, playing, and walking are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential of a new level of participation by city residents."
Actions: What You Can Do With the City, installation view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal ©CCA. Photo Michel Legendre
ONGOING
SuperMax Subscriptions is an initiative that seeks to connect a surplus provided by well-traveled citizens to a population that never gets to go anywhere: prisoners in American SuperMax prisons.
SuperMax Subscriptions asks people with surplus miles from airline travel award programs to take advantage of a popular program that allows you to exchange relatively small quantities of miles for magazine subscriptions. Miles in these award programs will often expire before it is possible to save enough of them for a free airline ticket, seating upgrade, or other costly prize. For as few as 300 miles, one could instead use these miles to give the gift of a yearly magazine subscription to a person in prison.
The first goal of SuperMax Subscriptions is to connect people in travel award programs to the entire population of Tamms SuperMax Prison in Tamms, Illinois and to provide every prisoner in the facility with at least one magazine subscription.
Supermax Subscriptions sent a mailing asking every man
incarcerated at Tamms C-Max unit if they would like to receive magazine
subscriptions: free gifts from people with surplus airline award miles
that
they'd like to exchange for gift subscriptions. Tamms C-Max is a no
contact,
permanent solitary confinement prison in Southern Illinois. The men
have been
there for years on end, many for ten years. They have no communal
activity,
no phone calls, no programs, no education, no work, no librarian, and
virtually
no reading. Already, over ten percent of the population has replied to our mailing.
The
magazine requests are pouring in and we have men who would like to
receive
everything from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal to Horse
Illustrated.
Clearly the need for reading materials is dire and we are excited to
start the
process of helping these guys out.
Participate: Email us at: supermax [at] temporaryservice [dot] org. Tell us how many miles you can donate (minimum of 400) and we will then provide you with the name, inmate number, address, and magazine preference for a prisoner. If you provide a large number of miles, we'll provide you with information to take care of multiple requests.
Thank you for your interest! If anything is unclear, please don't hesitate to ask!
Supermax Subscriptions is a collaborative effort of the Tamms Poetry Committee, Sarah Ross, Temporary Services (Brett Bloom,
Salem
Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer) and you.
More about Supermax Subscriptions:
www.temporaryserivces.org/supsub.html
More about Tamms:
www.yearten.org
The Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor presents:
From June 4 to 14, 2008, a group of people traveled through Illinois and Wisconsin in search of a Radical Midwest. Continental Drift is a series of spatial-political inquiries initiated by theorist Brian Holmes and the 16 Beaver Group. This book documents an iteration of this search by a group of artists and theorists who wander the Northern Plains looking for moments of social and ecological frictions and divergences. Made up of short essays on sites and means of travel- the book is a sweet application of Lucy Lippard’s “Lore of the Local” and some kind of neo-situationist extended road trip. This is a publication that hints at ways to develop deeply contextual theory and to outlive the grids of mechanization. Stops include organic dairies, urban farms, the Black Holocaust Museum and the Experimental Station.
Contributions by: mIEKAL aND, Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune, Martha Boyd and Naomi Davis, Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Ryan Griffis, Eric Haas, Sarah Holm, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, The Langby Family, Nicolas Lampert, Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross, Claire Pentecost, Dan S. Wang, Mike Wolf and Rebecca Zorach
60 pages, Published by Heavy Duty Press. $10.00.
Get your copy at: Half Letter Press or the Journal for Aesthetics and Protest
2008
If you are in Chicago Oct. 16th, come to the Cultural Center for an evening of discussion, coordinated by Salem Collo-Julin. This Artist at Work series is called Making Art Making Change. Join me, Aay Preston-Myint, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Zena Sakowski and Salem Collo-Julin -- "for a lively discussion at an important time."
Check out Mind the Gap: Noticing the Unnoticed opening Sept. 12 and run through Nov. 22 at the University of Colorado Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs. "The artists in Mind the Gap call attention to negative space - the areas around intended focus. These artists deal with pauses in dialogue rather than the words spoken, small aberrations in architecture rather than the building’s looming facade, or a decrepit vacant lot rather than the complete and occupied store next door. By pointing out what is typically unnoticed, we are encouraged to re-examine our world and look around the obvious."
InAction: Preparing for a Crash will open Oct. 2, 2008 and run through Nov. 5 at the Dittmar Memorial Gallery at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Come to the gallery on Oct. 18. for an InAction workshop; participants can check out InAction units, practice inaction and consider crashing economies.
The Audacity of Desperation is an exhibition that will travel from May -Nov. 2008. The show was organized by myself and Jessica Lawless. With over 50 artists, performers and participants, the show was an amazing act of collaborative work! The Audacity of Desperation first exhibited at the Independent Media Center in Urbana, IL and traveled to DEMO Space at PS122 in New York and Sea and Space Explorations in Los Angeles.
