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.

I had been working on my Odd Jobs business card parody book around the time of these events, so I put a copy of it up in the window, along with some signs, trying to get hired, but nothing really panned out from that. So I ended up putting myself to work.

I worked on the street trees right outside the gallery where we were living. They all seemed to be dying, so I aerated their roots by removing the cobble stones  that were crowding them, added some mulch, pruned off dead branches, and built little tree guard fences around them using the dead branches I had removed. I called it the Dead Branch Memorial Tree Guards.

Meanwhile, I was doing a lot of foraging for wild edible and medicinal herbs in the city parks around New Haven, continuing a practice of amateur botany I’ve developed over the years, (see also: MOBILIZE the Portable Pantry, We Common, and A Boat for Christine Periord). I dried the herbs and used the cobbles I had salvaged from the street tree beds to set up a table for having Wild Tea Parties with whoever happened to pass by.