Part II- 8-hour-projects

My experience at 8 hour projects this Saturday was a bit different than my other experiences attending it because I was there from 9-6 working as a gallery assistant. I enjoyed seeing the very beginning of the projects because everything was really quiet, and all of the artists were doing very different things to prepare for their pieces. It seemed that some artists came in, and knew exactly what they were going to do, while others seemed to have a bit of a harder time trying to really grasp what it is they were intending. What I really liked about the theme "Loss" was that it became a completely subjective word, wide open to interpretation for each of the artists. For example, Steven Prince created a drawing of a historical fight that took place in the early 1900's in which one man seems to lose, while the other dominates. This is a very literal approach to "loss" rich is history and culture. His process was very meditative to watch, because as the day progressed he kept on slowly chipping away at his end result. Towards the end of 8-hour projects, for about 3 hours, I helped Zimbabwean artist Lucia Nhamo create a recreation of a newspaper headline that she had seen in her native Zimbabwe recently. It was interesting to talk to her and hear how she feels about this massive epidemic, and collaborate with her to create something that is extremely relevant today. While I was painting with Lucia, I messed up a couple times and the paint began to drip. I apologized immediately and her response was really beautiful. She said that she wanted to keep in that mistake that I had made, only touching it up a little bit. She didn't want her piece to seem too forced into just being a replication of a newspaper, rather something that someone is creating with their hands, and she wanted signs of life in her project that is ironically rooted in loss and death. For me, that was a really cool experience because I was so afraid of ruining her piece, but in the creative process, I feel like sometimes it is those mistakes that turn the project into something different and unexpected. In general, I really enjoyed my experience of being there all day and helping the artists. It was very uplifting for me to have some of the artists ask me what I thought would be best, and were genuinely interested in my own thoughts and opinions about their piece. I really liked that about half of the pieces in the 8-hour projects required participation and collaboration. The pieces would not have became what they were if people did not participate and openly engage in this work. It was refreshing to hear how humbled the artists were, and how they did not expect as many people to participate that did.