Writing with Tricia Blauvelt: Road trip to New Mexico

For those of you who don't know, Tricia Blauvelt, Wear Recycle writer, myself and a very awesome new friend Zen went on a road trip from Chicago to New Mexico. There were a few goals in the trip....Tricia and I wanted to complete the new updated literature for Wear Recycle, and Trish was moving there for the winter to pursue pottery. We had many adventures that will be explained in a different blog, but this is the Wear Recycle work we completed. :D

Introduction:

Wear Recycle is a series of international art exhibits integrating art, fashion, pop culture and psychology to understand patterns that develop in childhood and how they affect adult relationships. This conceptual art production brings together the process of making recycled paper and using that paper as the key medium to explore interaction.

Wear Recycle presents this question: Can we, as people, change parts of our behavior that don’t serve us by choosing how we act instead of reverting to inherent behavior. Artist, Nicky Watts, uses her life as a public experiment to prove it’s possible.


History:

Will be a time line...

Process:

Wear Recycle is a process oriented production in which the interactions that are occurring between participants, collaborators and Watts are just as important as the artwork itself. All Wear Recycle artwork is either a documentation of an interaction or a process in which Watts analyzes her internal reactions.

After a participant has been chosen, a plaster cast is taken from a fraction of the body. Watts then uses the cast as a base to build a sculpture with recycled paper. Once complete, a team is assembled to photograph the original participant wearing his/her cast.

During the photo shoots, Watts uses a digital camera and an 8x10 negative view camera. The digital film provides an opportunity for interaction among all participants involved in the process. The 8x10 negatives will be exhibited with the sculptures in the Wear Recycle exhibitions.



The Wear Recycle Poster Show:

The Wear Recycle Poster Show series offers various opportunities for interaction with the purpose of creating an environment to understand the concept of Wear Recycle. Each series will be a collaboration with a different designer or artist using the digital photography as the base inspiration.

The first exhibition in the Wear Recycle Poster Show series was named Seasons. These posters were designed by Catherine Savello from Verge Marketing Group and presented at The Elephant Room gallery in Chicago, IL and SPACE gallery in Las Vegas, NV.

A required part of each The Wear Recycle Poster Shows is a performance in which Watts confines herself to the gallery for a minimum of five days. This forces Watts to depend on people for necessities as well as companionship and offers an opportunity for random interaction.

Wear Recycle Exhibition:

The Wear Recycle exhibition will include the sculptures and photographs shot with the view camera. Each sculpture will be presented in a custom plexi-glass box, and the photographs will be printed 48x60 inches on handmade recycled paper. Accompanied with the artwork will be plaques honoring participants and sponsors.

Watts will spend one year establishing a new Wear Recycle exhibition in each country: Italy, Philippines, India, and Brazil. The close of Wear Recycle will include a selection of all the artwork in a retrospective exhibition and the publication of a book.

NARSAD:

In order to become a bridge between science and art Wear Recycle will soon be partnered with the nonprofit organization, NARSAD, National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. Watts’ goal is to teach people healthy ways of living by publicly discovering and changing her negative childhood patterns. Finding a researcher to supplement Watts’ discoveries will strengthen the understanding of how negative patterns can be replaced with healthy ones. Ten percent of the proceeds from the Wear Recycle exhibition will be donated to NARSAD’s “Sponsor a Researcher” program. With the goal of raising $30,000 in the U.S. exhibition, Wear Recycle will sponsor a beginning researcher with the hope to give continued support through out the his or her career.


Thank you Patricia Blauvelt for all of your hard work over the last week. You always take what's in my head and doesn't make sense to anyone else and transform it to some thing exactly what I meant to say ;).....and a whole lot better.