First Person Arts

One of our 2008 Salon presenters, Jenny Kanzler, and Shelley Spector–First Person Arts’ partner in whine for the Philly Complaint Choir–are part of a show at My House Gallery dedicated entirely to the 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper!  Besides being a great idea for a show, it offers an added entendre to the phrase “works on paper.”  Check it out tonight:

My House Gallery invites you to attended its opening of PAPER JAM on Friday, September 19th from 5:30pm to 8:30pm.

The 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper has become a fixture in our
contemporary culture. This standard image confronts us every day.
Containing advertisement, files, faxes, business contracts, photo
copies, and a myriad of information, we take in the information, often
over looking the spatial context within which it is contained. What if
our standard paper size was drastically different? What if it was half
of or doubled in size? How would this change our perception and
understanding of information? Paper Jam puts the 8 1/2 by 11 piece of
paper under the hand of the artist to allow them to expand or contract
their artistic understanding of the parameters of space presented.

My House Gallery
2534 S. 8th Street
Philadelphia, PA
19148

You can see Shelley Spector (whose sit Spector PROJECTS chronicles her own artistic projects) at the preliminary meeting for the Complaint Choir, September 25th at the Gershman Y (401 S. Broad St.).  Find out more details here at the Philly Complaint Choir Blog.  See you there!

A champion of first person arts (and First Person Arts), Miss Koco’s established a nice archive of projects in what we might as well call Distributed Documentary: “Distributed,” because it is not all collected at one time, but “Documentary,” nevertheless, because it does adhere to a single collection point.  Here’s one she conducted for a year in 1998-1999:

the door, 1998-1999

For a year I asked people who came to visit me to sign and leave something from their wallet, bag, or purse on my door.

It’s a visitor tax, levied entirely in ephemera:

Check out the rest of the collection HERE.

Davy Rothbart, with Found Magazine, has built the world’s largest ‘door’ and encouraged millions of people across the world to deliver to it an astonishing array of found items-scraps from the lives of others–fragments of stories that form a far less time-bound or geographically centered picture than Miss Koco’s “the door.”  But for what his found objects lack in narrative coherence, they gain in sheer wonder and, in some cases, voyeuristic indulgence.

Rothbart will be at the First Person Arts Festival, Friday November 14th with a collection of some of his found items.  Miss Koco, we’re guessing, will probably be there too.

Found
Location: Painted
Bride
Time: 7-8PM
Cost: $10

Davy Rothbart,
founder of the wildly popular underground magazine Found (also
a book and website) weaves some of his most fascinating finds into an
energetic presentation. Join Rothbart for his entertaining
elaboration on the stories behind the cast-off notes and letters
plucked from the nation’s subways, schools, streets and
sidewalks.

Davy
Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine, is a collector,
author, filmmaker, and frequent contributor to the public radio show
This American Life. The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, a
collection of Rothbart’s short stories, was published in 2005
by Simon & Schuster, and Geffen Records recently released
Rothbart’s documentary film How We Survive about
the punk rock band Rise Against. Rothbart lives in his hometown of
Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And exhibit of
Found items will be on display in the Painted Bride Gallery
throughout the Festival. Audience members are invited to contribute
their own discoveries to Found’s collection of anonymous
ephemera.

Tickets are available for advance purchase here.

Back in May, we invited photographer Chris Paquette to a Salon to share a project he’d been working on documenting roadside memorials to car-accident victims. There was a spirited discussion afterwards that inspired Paquette to expand the project in a new direction:

I have been photographing Road Side Memorials for the past two years. In May I presented a slide show and lecture about my project at First Person Arts in Philadelphia. Several people at the First Person Arts lecture encouraged me to expand and continue this project. And now begins the process of meeting and interviewing people who have created some of these memorials in order to tell their stories.

Two weeks ago I interviewed Annie, who lives in Delaware. Ten years ago, when she was 16, her best friend Colin was struck and killed by a drunk driver.Annie and Colin were born a day apart and were inseparable friends their entire lives. In November, it will be exactly ten years, and friends and family will gather at the base of the tree in the small town in North Carolina where Colin died. The tree that Annie begged the city council not to cut down during the Tree Replenishment program a few years ago. Don’t take my tree….she begged. Ten years. Annie cried throughout most of our conversation. The pain is still so real.

Read the rest here.

First Person Arts established the Salons at the Gershman Y as a showcase for emerging and accomplished artists working in memoir and documentary art across a variety of media. On Wednesday, July 9th, join us for the next Salon at the Gershman Y!