collaboration

I’m a little late, but I thought I ought to share a project my friend and I had been working on for nearly a year. We saw a call for a show for emerging artist groups, and decided on a whim to apply. We whipped together a proposal for this project, got accepted, and had about ten months to get it together. This was our idea:

We met at our university in the art department, became roommates, and shared a studio space. We were always working side by side and bouncing ideas off each other, although we did VERY different types of work. Then life happened, and I found myself in Toronto while she is attending grad school in Kansas. After a discussion about how difficult it is to stay motivated to make work after graduating, and missing having each other nearby for encouragement, we decided on this project to challenge each other. We’d create a series of postcards that were each a collaboration between both of us. I’d make a postcard (it could be anything at all), mail it to her, and she’d have to change it or add to it in some way, similar to the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse. And vice versa–she’d start a postcard I’d have to finish.

It was such a fun project, and by the time we really got rolling with it, we’d created probably over 100 postcards. Of course, most of them were rejects! Having a large amount took away the pressure of making each one a masterpiece, so we could really just have fun with it. I did a lot with watercolor and pen and ink, while she would tend to work in acrylic and screen printing. Combining the media was often a challenge, but it forced us to think creatively. Also, just coming up with a decent idea of what to do with something was really difficult. She’d send me so many amazing cards, and I would have zero ideas. But it was so fun to see what she would send, and what she would come up with to add to mine.

This one was a favorite of both of ours. She had screen printed what was actually the handle of a tomahawk (just something she already had burned into a screen from a previous project) several times in a row. When I got the card, I had no idea what it was, or what to do with it, so this is how it ended up.