morningtomorning.net 

 

April 2014

 

Morning to Morning is continuously bringing questions to mind for me. Typically at the forefront always seems to be: what do I want? A very broad question, yes, but applicable to anything and everything and so I hope, a helpful question. Every month as I begin to work, I catch myself asking this question. Effectively, finding something I feel compelled to express, deciding if I feel capable of expressing said “thing” and then trying to express it. I continuously struggle with this internal navigation of figuring out where to go and why. Why I care and why do I feel the need to communicate this thing. Finding myself at odds with the work I do and, well, with myself, I am rendered rather thoughtless at time. But this question continues to ask itself. This month I found myself identifying this mental silence with a new kind of freedom and to explore my own personal landscape with less hesitation. I took to this internal terrain with the curiosity of any wanderer.

 

In the past month I took a number of trips to different open air museums; places where, when perfect, you could follow no one, hear no one (not even a docent), and could barely find plaques describing what you were looking at. Although not entirely new to me, I found these self-guided walks through these outdoor exhibitions groundbreaking. More than exhibitions they were just landscapes, intricate and detailed like done by a miniaturist, only real! The amount of land to travel alone felt massive enough without looking for what was on exhibition. I think because of this, I felt the freedom to just roam and see what I would see and let pass what I never found. This allowed for a completely personal interaction between you and whatever it was you ended up finding. My first instinct when I did stumble upon something was usually to explore the two of us together, moving around, or inside, each other--taking the time to genuinely explore this object. I found my interactions with the structures housed within these wall-less galleries to be really playful and engaged. Free from the bounds of artificial light, my eyes and body would happily troll the sprawling, borderless canvas. I could interact with the works of these open air museums without trying! Beyond that, this place (where you could imagine the night time in this place without it seeming like some kooky children’s movie, or the artwork wet as rain poured down on it) gives itself entirely to the landscape, rather than the inverse where the architecture fades away behind the hung frames. These open air museums felt lived in, and therefore largely different from a museum setting. The lock-down of artwork, or whatever the case may be, within a museum--where the environment will never change, the air will never change and no one will ever step more than an arms length nearer the frame--has been leaving me feeling unwanted as both artist and audience.

 

These open air museums are places for imagination, for standing on top of the art work to understand it, or to simply roll across it. It is in this way that I want us to look at the website--as an open air landscape. I hope that with each piece contributed the terrain becomes more elevated. That the terrain becomes more intriguing, complex and alive. Look at these pieces found here in conversation with each other and the space wherein they exist not at this website as a way for us to simply post our own work. I think it is important to combat seeing these pieces as isolated works that we have published online for ourselves, but to see them as the workings of a group within the same landscape (spatially, temporally and perhaps even conceptually). View them in any order you like, whenever you want. Although there is not much in the way of corporeal work here, allow yourself the permission to interact with the work as you desire.

 

Timothy Scott