POND for Tagvverk

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

by Miriam Karraker with Theo Ellin Ballew

Think pond: standing water, its murk, the likely threat of mosquito breeding. Ponds are perhaps the lowliest waterbody, second only to puddles. They lack the majesty of a lake, river, or ocean. Yet, there is a certain appeal in the pond's particular isolation. They sometimes arise out of naturally occurring depressions on the land, sometimes because humans make them. Within the humble form of the pond, there is considerable variation, depending on water nutrient levels, the amount of sunlight or shade, the presence or absence of streams, shore animal activity, and seasonal flooding or lack thereof.

I wanted to explore what would happen if people were asked to make work within a somewhat closed system, how they would play with, bump into, and rail against limits. Theo Ellin Ballew, who did web conception and construction for this project, and I chose the pond as a metaphorical embodiment of such limits. Theo designed a flexible web format we called POND, which would "contain" and "bind" contributions as physical galleries or printed publications do. The POND parameters are not more stringent than those of more traditional binding/containing practices — but their newness made them more deeply felt. We sent all artists this POND example, along with the following parameters:

You're making a pond and you're putting things in it.

Container/Pond parameters:
Must be rectangular, white on black background
No edge of the pond exceeds the computer screen (we'll worry about different screen sizes for you)
Side lengths must have measurements that change in relation to the screen size
Objects/Flotsam (what goes in your pond) parameters:
5-10 items (video, image, or text) total, all of which can be moved by user, and are lost when moved outside the pond
No more than 150 words of text total
No video can last longer than 5 min
Consider each pond a sketch, a piece of a broader practice placed under additional pressure. Consider these signs of threatened and threatening life.

Click on the names in the POND above to see what we received in return. All PONDs are optimized for your desktop.

CONTRIBUTORS

Annika Berry is a video maker in northern New Mexico. Her work fixes upon the Cowboy identity as a lens to examine constructed gender, American politics, desire, and visual culture. She enjoys recording interviews, both traditional and untraditional. Her research has taken her to the high Pyrenees of Spain and the stockyards of central Texas. Her family came from farms. Her grandmother moved to Montana from Hollywood.

Sophie Durbin is a multidisciplinary based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can find her at www.sophiedurbin.com and on Instagram at @auntie_pancake.

Mara Duvra is a visual artist whose work combines photography, poetry, video, sculpture, and her experience as an artist who reads, writes, and collects to create and arrange objects as text and text as objects / studying the malleable qualities of images and poetry to create installations that explore stillness and interiority to condense both voice and matter.

Theo Ellin Ballew has gone home to Los Angeles, CA; Baltimore, MD; Cincinnati, OH; Scottsdale, AZ; Tempe, AZ; Fresno, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Salt Lake City, UT; New Haven, CT; Cambridge, MA; Dallas, TX; Brooklyn, NY; Denver, CO; Mexico City, Mexico; and Providence, RI, in roughly that order. She writes short fictional lyric prose, some of which she programs to move, and directs ORAL, which publishes moving/digital literature from the US and Mexico in thorough translation. More at theo.land.

Jonathan Kaiser is an interdisciplinary artist whose work across music, film, and sculpture explores embodied physical presence in relation to time and material conditions. His work has been shown at Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Rochester Art Center, EFA Project Space, MU Eindhoven, and others. He currently plays music with the experimental string trio Pyrrha and a solo project called Dissolving.

Miriam Karraker writes, performs, draws, and lives in Minneapolis. She is interested in legibility, embodied experience, long walks, and one particular heron. miriamkarraker.com.

Mary Lodu is a first-generation Sudanese immigrant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She currently works as a Project Coordinator at the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. You can find her on instagram here.

Gunnar Tchida is a Wyoming-based artist, poet, and ecologist. She is the author of Road Ecology (Ginny Projects, forthcoming) and Itch Corridor (2014). In 2015, she founded Cowgirls for Voluntary Human Extinction. She is currently working for a sensory ecology lab looking at the effects of river noise on insect, bat, and songbird communities in the Pioneer Mountains. The hermit thrush sings her favorite song.

Sheila Wagner is a painter living in Minneapolis, MN. Her painting practice is an unfolding poem, project, and puzzle. She believes her paintings are best viewed in a kitchen, or living room, while eating snacks and while fully hydrated. Her most used color is yellow ochre.

Made for Temp Editions from Tagvverk (TE01)

Curated by Miriam Karraker

Web concept and construction by Theo Ellin Ballew