Fallow Collective presents the second edition of ‘Bonds’, an in-city family residency that will take place in a series of public leisure sites around Seattle this summer.
Join in this performance of ‘Bonds’ on a picnic blanket in Volunteer Park. You will find us in a small grassy field, just west of the Seward statue, in front of the Conservatory. 1402 E Galer St, Seattle, Washington 98112. From 5pm – 8:15pm (sunset)
This edition of Bonds falls on the full moon, and also on the 12th anniversary of when one Fallow Collective member began feeding another Fallow Collective member (….my milk came in, after giving birth two days before). To celebrate the cycles of fertility we ALL were born of and our connection to this celestial orb, we’ll be offering you ‘moon bread’ and red velvet cake!
To give back to the cycles of fertility, we are asking you to bring menstrual supplies that will be donated to All Cycles, an outreach project that provides support for menstruating folks who are homeless. http://allcycles.org/
The work doesn’t get done without you.
Help create weavings on the bodies of Fallow Collective artists.
We’ll have additional circle weavings set up so you can put on your own fingers to see what it’s like. It’s wonderful.
Feed yourself with Fallow Collective home-made bread and experimental desserts.
Feed us while our hands are tied up in the mode of production.
Experience the pleasure of making, giving and receiving, in a no-goal, no-skill, no-judgement framework bolstered by the energy of hands in motion together.
Bread, Fruit, Flowers, Desserts, Risk, Vulnerability, Companionship and Touch will be available on the picnic blanket from about 5-8:15pm (at sunset). All are welcome, All ages. You are welcome to bring your own blanket, and things to share. Come rest with us, linger, pass the time, make, eat.
What is Fallow Collective?
Fallow Collective places itself at odds with the dominate narrative of the art world for the maternal artist, that residencies = no children allowed, that children are a distraction, that studio time = ignoring your child.
Fallow Collective chips away at the frustrations that the maternal artist must choose between studio time or having friends, must choose between studio time or spending time with your partner and family, choose between childcare costs and participating in cultural events, choose between drinking with other artists or being alert to care for children. Fallow Collective rejects that the maternal desire to be near your child is at odds with studio practice, that maternal desire is only of importance/of consequence to a maternal audience and that care-taking is of little value to the art world unless done by a man…..all this we aim to resist even as we acknowledge the times it feels true. We aspire to a shift. A shift where the maternal is not hidden behind an artist identity, a shift where the artist mother is visible, is not swallowed whole by the dominant culture’s notion of what the maternal should be.
Visibility is a political position. Fallow is what happens when ‘production’ slows , but health and fertility returns. The Un-health of market capitalism only views the artist as ‘productive’ when they are churning out luxury goods to be bought and sold on a rarefied market.
Fallow Collective takes its cue from a lineage of relational and maternal aesthetics. Not presenting a fantasy or imagined vision of reality, but an actual mode of living and plan for taking action within the world as it is, even on the smallest scale of a social picnic. Rather than viewer and object, meaning is held and passed between all parties involved collectively.
Who is Fallow Collective?
Fallow Collective is an incubator and laboratory of an inter-generational core group of artists consisting of Mandy Greer, Hazel Margolis and Paul Margolis, who together –thicker than water and thicker than thieves– create installation, performance and media works. Primarily generating works through an on-going series of ‘family-in-residence’ projects, both independently generated and supported by traditional residency programs, Fallow Collective challenges and upends the arbitrary boundaries between art-making, leisure, care-taking, family and exploration.
http://mandygreer.org/fallow-collective/
Mandy Greer 