"Precinct" was a site-specific art project/performance/exhibit put on by SITE: Buffalo Artist Collective, an organization devoted to a non-traditional approach to art emphasizing the experiential and the value of ghosts contained in found objects and images.
Artists Carin Whitney and Gayle Gorman worked both together and independently to create work for the space. Issues of absence, of socialization of boys/children, of identity fluxuation, and longings for a secure place -metapohoricaly and literally- were all themes present and active within both artists' work and in their approach to the work. The empty space took on liminal properties. The distinctions between the childs world and the adults blurred with misplacements and confrontations.
With the aid of the Buffalo Arts Commission, the abandoned police precinct on Niagara Street on Buffalo's West side was occupied and interacted with for a one-day open-to-the-public viewing. The building is a one-story-plus-basement cube-like Modernist structure with a cement facade with lots of graffiti on the outside. The police had pulled out of it, and the surrounding neighborhood, to consolidate their forces in the central city center.
The rooms were occupied and left as found. There were prints, photographs, digitally-altered and not. There were sculptures and installations, two sound pieces and a film loop. And 2 giant scruffy parade animal people.
Click on the images to find out more about the details.....
ps: The sounds playing throughout represent portions of 2 sound pieces by Gayle Gorman: 1) little girl (Noel Sings Noel) singing was piped through old crackly PA system upstairs, 2) AM channel-surfing collage was in a basement room that had police blotter memos on walls.
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