Westbrook Artists' Site - Vision
Aaron Swanson and Jennifer Drinkwater Swanson with team Red Merkins during RAGBRAI 2019
Steve Gabriel presenting at PFI annual conference on Silvopastures
EVERY PLACE NAME IS A STORY, AN OUTCROPPING of the shared tales that form the bedrock of community. Untold land is unknown land. The places most valued by Americans in the early nineteenth century were those evoking myth or legend, and most of the newly American landscape, supposedly bereft of human history, was perceived as inferior to that of Europe, where every hillock told someone a story.
- Lucy Lippard, Lure of the Local, 1997
K. Lair. 2019
|
K. Lair. 2016
|
What is rural?
I have been informally posing the question, "what is rural?" The intention is to start a conversation around what we take for granted and see what emerges. Foremost, "rural" is hard to define. When we are unable to define something it tends to suffer. One of my students observed the rural as being a place of "raw resources." The implication is that resources are used for us to create something else... somewhere else. The observation came later that the rural is also a place to discard waste (depleted resources). The Westbrook Artists' Site in the most simple terms is an exploration how we see the rural. So does the rural matter? At times I find myself exploring those traces of consumption and exploitation at other times what feels like the depth of a place and other ways we can experience it than conventional attitudes about the rural. - KL 07/17
K. Lair. 2016
K. Lair. 2019
5In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say we are “embodied.” We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violent, reckless ways?
- Jane Bennet , Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things
The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS)
The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) is located on approximately 550 acres of land near Winterset, IA. From 1996 to 2006, WAS operated as an artist owned venue for interdisciplinary art, design and architecture. WAS has deepened its mission, focusing on the history and condition of the land itself, to provide an experiential laboratory for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition. The WAS mission contains four goals:
1) to re-frame the post-industrial rural site
2) to build WAS as an art space that reveals the complexity and nuance of rural and farm existence
3) to expand the discourse of art and design in rural contexts
4) to provide a resource and inspiration for innovation in interdisciplinary art and design. WAS projects involve individuals and interdisciplinary teams working both on and off site and culminate with annual public events. The work consists of installations, events and the documentation (visual, textual) of work process.
Our notions of aesthetic interpretation has greatly shaped a shift in my design approach to engage in a more critical practice. It is also heavily influenced by pursuit of an ethical approach to design for the environment. Through my familiarity and attachment to a particular place, we have been increasingly drawn to question our own paradigms. This has led us to view creative work less as a project and more as an inquiry. In drawing on notions of criticism and education as part of the artistic production, the acts of viewing, hearing, judging, discussing converge into the work of art itself. This perspective has influenced the new direction, the Westbrook Artists’ Site, is heading. our website provides overviews of projects within the larger endeavor of WAS to help illustrate how these ideas are applied.
- Jane Bennet , Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things
The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS)
The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) is located on approximately 550 acres of land near Winterset, IA. From 1996 to 2006, WAS operated as an artist owned venue for interdisciplinary art, design and architecture. WAS has deepened its mission, focusing on the history and condition of the land itself, to provide an experiential laboratory for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition. The WAS mission contains four goals:
1) to re-frame the post-industrial rural site
2) to build WAS as an art space that reveals the complexity and nuance of rural and farm existence
3) to expand the discourse of art and design in rural contexts
4) to provide a resource and inspiration for innovation in interdisciplinary art and design. WAS projects involve individuals and interdisciplinary teams working both on and off site and culminate with annual public events. The work consists of installations, events and the documentation (visual, textual) of work process.
Our notions of aesthetic interpretation has greatly shaped a shift in my design approach to engage in a more critical practice. It is also heavily influenced by pursuit of an ethical approach to design for the environment. Through my familiarity and attachment to a particular place, we have been increasingly drawn to question our own paradigms. This has led us to view creative work less as a project and more as an inquiry. In drawing on notions of criticism and education as part of the artistic production, the acts of viewing, hearing, judging, discussing converge into the work of art itself. This perspective has influenced the new direction, the Westbrook Artists’ Site, is heading. our website provides overviews of projects within the larger endeavor of WAS to help illustrate how these ideas are applied.
WAS 2104 - Community Conversation with A. Torke and E. Walden