Produced collaboratively with Namulen Bayarsaihan, Orhontuul Banzragch, Bat-Orgil Batulga, Dashdondog Badam (and family), Saruul Artist Residency, Selenge, Mongolia, 2019. We brought manufactured turf to a nomadic herding family’s home on common grazing lands, borrowed their table, and used it to ceremoniously offer the sod to their animals.
This is a video installation work, in which an American field research scientist character performs experiments to prove the insubstantiality of political barriers from a natural law perspective. The video was produced on location at the fence on the closed border between Armenia and Turkey.
I did a residency at the Nest, a program of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Yerevan, Armenia, in the summer of 2018. While there I worked on a social engagement/experimental documentary project, collecting stories of indigenous foods and the cultural effects of displacement from homelands, collaborating with an Armenian diaspora food historian, Mari Firkatian.
THE TREE SPA FOR URBAN FOREST HEALING uses the steam generated as a byproduct of the maple syrup evaporation process to power a communal steam room. Participants take the healing waters of the trees and discuss important matters affecting our communities, in the relaxing social space of a steamroom, while drinking tree juice from the maple trees growing nearby. The Tree Spa is based in Keney Park, in the North End of Hartford, Connecticut, a neighborhood with a poverty rate near 50%.
After my 26 mile walking performance, Mapping the Audible Dominion of the Mission Church Bells, I began leading group walks of public spaces to think about the private property ownership structure we live within. Here are a few images from the first two walks, which were part of a “Day of Action” at Emmanuel College in October, 2017. We circled counterclockwise around the bell tower at the Catholic college where these young people study, performing three widening circumambulations and talking about evidence of the history of the colonization of this land (the homeland of the Massachusett Indigenous Peoples), as we encountered it along the way.
I performed a 26 mile walk, which I have mapped out here, circumambulating nine times counter-clockwise around the Mission Church in the present-day Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, the traditional homeland of the Massachusett people.
I built a small weatherproofed shed and installed it in New Haven as part of A Lot in Our Lives in 2007. I made custom clapboards for the sides, little round windows, and a miniature orange door, and I put asphalt roofing on it. It was pretty sturdy.
Ted Efremoff organized a show called Insite/Out in June 2012 at Artspace, New Haven, CT. For two weeks I lived and worked in the gallery along with artists James Sham, James Holland, Rebecca Parker, and Ariana Jacob. For me, this was a return to a neighborhood in which I had previously done a major project (A Lot in Our Lives). I had also grown up going to punk shows around the corner at a club called the Tune Inn that is no longer around. The neighborhood has been gentrifying and developing a lot since I’ve known it, due to its proximity to Yale and the downtown New Haven Business Improvement District.
This was a project I organized with Ted Efremoff. We built this boat in Willimantic, Connecticut, in three weeks. It is a wooden lapstrake canoe with a canvas sail. It was built with the help and participation of about 100 people from the local area.
In the winter of 2009-2010 I was working on how to collect Sycamore (London Plane) sap from all the street and park trees in New York, and boil it down for Sycamore syrup, which reportedly is like maple syrup, but a little more “mediocre.” I documented that project along with some other related thoughts and experiences in a work called We Common, published by ISCP in an exhibition catalog Out of the Blue, and online at the Center for Collective Wealth.
Cloud City is an imagined utopia somewhere out there… A collaboration with Huong Ngo and numerous participants…
This was a wide-ranging project I did in 2009, collaborating with Huong Ngo. It was part of an alternative pedagogy project she was organizing called Secret School. We started thinking about all the other secret gardens, the ones that you don’t even know are there, tucked away onto rooftops and hidden in backyards.
I’ve been out riding my tricycle a lot. I found it back in 2004. It was in pieces. I fixed it up, added some bells and whistles, and started riding. I like it, it gets me moving. Doing it. You know, getting into it, active.
Sam Ekwurtzel and I made a sauna by the lake at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007.
This project in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, ran April through September of 2007. It consisted of a variety of activities centered around a public space called The Lot, sponsored by Artspace. I worked in collaboration with various people around the city who have some relationship to the space, to develop interactive projects to place there.
This project started as one aspect of my elaborate MFA thesis exhibition, A Work of Art, in 2005. It continued as a portable system for one-on-one collaborations with strangers for several years afterwards.
In 2005, I worked 40 hours a week at a museum for five weeks, tending to a film I had installed, talking to people about the film and whatever else came up, playing music, writing, making prints, etc.
This was a banner drop I did on a parking garage in 2003, trying to create a blank, neutral, unspecified, and therefore disturbing message. I was thinking about and documenting the way American flags were being displayed on overpasses, construction sites, homes, and gas stations around that time, as the Terror War was getting going after 9/11/01. I made a short super 8 film about it. This action of hanging the banner was an attempt to complicate the conversations that were going on, which seemed to be all about choosing sides. The phrase “These Colors Don’t Run” has been used as a patriotic slogan for many years, in reference to national integrity and pride as embodied in an enduring, bright flag. My flag was colorless, blank, white on white.
One time I custom made a couple of signs for an empty sign post that had been sitting there for years with nothing on it. It was in front of the human resources building at the University of Connecticut, and across the street from a prison. The signs sparked some discussion among university employees through an interesting misreading and coincidence of timing. It was placed on a Friday, one week after Thanksgiving. The previous week university staff had been given the day immediately after the holiday (Friday) off work, for the first time ever. So people were worried that the phrase “Today is a Work Day” might seem like a (rather absurd) authoritative admonishment to employees, something along the lines of, “You had last Friday off but that doesn’t mean you have every Friday off, make sure you are at work today.” My signs were removed and eventually, through my having drawn attention to it, so was the signpost.
I ran a life sized board game for a couple of days, working with some other people, back in 2001. The path was marked off with colored duct tape and we had these big dice. This was on my college campus when I was an undergraduate, and the idea of the project had to do with a critical attitude toward choosing a career and finding success in life. The game itself was all about being a kid. There were tasks you had to complete to advance along, things like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in 10 seconds, or coloring in a coloring book. Doing this project I started thinking more seriously about engaging creatively in public life, and it was the first time I used the Emcee C.M. moniker. So for me personally it was about choosing that as my game (and by “that” I mean this: what I still do now and whatever this website is all about).
This was the first public action I ever organized, back in 2000, and it has stayed with me as an example of a successful project and influenced a lot of the other things I’ve done since. I made this wooden machine out of shipping crates and cable spools with a support frame. A group of friends and I pushed it around disrupting traffic, and then rode it down a big hill. There were no brakes to speak of, so we were worried about hitting something or somebody, but in the end it was fine, and actually that was a little disappointing!