travel cash?

DIY and travel--keeping it 'real'!

yeah straight up dawn of man styles. 

everyone's all up in that these days like hunter gatherer.

more like mover shaker.

totally anti zen tip. straight up sitting & not making shit.

boooooo!

ummm yeah, totally bugged. actually i'm kinda into it sometimes...

totally, but sometimes you have to take the dream on the road, you know into the unknown.

word. you can learn a lot from architecture as a sequential experience.

what?

it's a total no brainer, the foil background

the regional pattern

boom! it's just boundaries of sentimentalism through existential journey

cool beans. but is it true? 

life as a bewildering maze?

but what would you do with the 1k?

travel expenses, duh!

don't be a hater

i'm just saying, plane ticket, gas money, hotel... money comes & goes. it goes faster than it comes

oh no! you didn't just get all fortune cookie on my ass

for reals. or could i use it to buy some land? like 4 square feet somewhere?

ha! yeah, the empire begins in inches

or square feet

right!

anywhoo the travel could have a goal

a destination. a land purchase holla

freedom in structure

word. otherwise you're just a blob spread thin

no doubt

the road is healthy

it's like periodically when something slips

yeah, that everyday principle of continuity

that hum drum element that tells you where you are in the narrative fades

Fuhgeddaboutit, abandoned to the waking dream

D'oh!

Bewilder - the soul - intensely

well, we could try anyway...

I ­would like to use a Present Prize Travel Grant to visit the Sabbath Day Lake Shaker Community in Gloucester, Maine to develop a residency with the last four living Shakers and to research Radical Sects and Utopian Societies of America for an upcoming tour with the Beautiful Possibility Project.

I have been granted permission for a six–week residency at the functioning 18^th Century Sabbath Day Lake Community to live, work, and “try the life” with the last four living Shakers as part of my touring project for 2012. A preliminary visit to the community in 2011 would allow me to meet the brothers and sisters who have generously granted me this unique residency and to solidify the relationship we have been developing through letters and emails. It would also allow me to research their library devoted to literature on contemporary and historic Utopian Societies that would prove vital to developing a tour route that would encompass some of these sites for my upcoming tour.

Beautiful Possibility is a Traveling Exhibition and Research project that explores American History and Culture through direct interactions with diverse regional I returned from a five-month, eight-venue, solo tour across the western half of the northern United States and southern Canada. I now have one year to organize and fund the eastern half of the tour from Minnesota to New York.  In these early stages, while I am transitioning from my recent return, finding work, and seeking venues for the next tour, this travel grant would allow me an important opportunity to solidify my plans and substantiate a proposal for the new tour.

This project is anchored to the West Coast; where I maintain a home and studio to develop new paintings based on my historical research and give performative lectures about my travels. The Project launched from Southern Exposure in San Francisco, who remain committed to its development and culmination in the Bay Area.

The travel grant would cover a flight to New York City, car rental to Maine, and living expenses for a five-day round-trip.

For the past ten years, I have worked with students in El Salvador and the Bay Area on community development and public art projects related to local story and agriculture through San Francisco State University’s Colima Project. This year, our granting organization has cut funding to all its projects, and recommended we take a year off from travel as a result of financial austerity measures.

However, in response to a request from women in an informal housing sector of Colima, we embarked on a new initiative last year with high-schoolers from Richmond, CA who have collaborated with youth in El Salvador via text-messaging and social media to create a set of ten hand-crafted wooden doors for houses that lack secure front doors in Colima. The doors have been laser-etched with conversation excerpts reflecting young people’s counsels for each other around safety, decision-making, and alternatives to violence, drug use, and gang affiliation – issues that are of increasing importance to youth in both communities. Each door is finished with paint in the colors that represented El Salvador to the young people in Richmond, and a ceramic knob inlaid with the family's name, as well as an iron hasp and padlock. Families in Colima will assist in installation of the doors, and we'll embark on the design of a new cycle of artworks based on local agriculture traditions, to be sent from Colima to Richmond in the coming year.

It looks like we may receive private funding this spring to cover the Richmond students’ travel in July of 2011, but a travel grant from the Present Group would support my travel as an artist, collaborator, and instructor, and help to install, document, and promote the artworks as a unique example of engaged public art and social practice in El Salvador. $600 would be used for plane fare, and the remaining money would be used for lodging in Colima, installation costs for the doors (hardware, handyman consultants in Colima), and travel to pursue exhibition opportunities and university lecture visits in San Salvador while we are there.

I recently took part in a collaborative exhibition between Irish and American artists which is currently being exhibited in California. Phase two of the collaboration involves exhibiting the work in Belfast, Ireland, with the inclusion of site-specific elements. The TPG Hosting travel grant would make it possible for me to travel to Belfast with the work, to meet the other participating artists, and to add a new, interactive element to the work being displayed.

My current work deals with the relationship between technologies of real-time broadcast and how we experience crisis, and incorporates elements of mixed media sculpture and video. One of my goals for phase two is to incorporate live video into the installation itself, so that a video feed of the sculptural works and the audience is mixed in real time with source footage, processed to add glitches and video effects, and displayed on a separate screen.

Traveling to Belfast would be my first opportunity to see my work installed abroad as I've never had a chance to attend the screenings or festivals I've been involved in. Approximately $800 of the grant would cover the flights to and from Ireland, with the remainder being used for lodging and materials (cheap computer CPU and LCD screen) for the interactive elements.

I intend to visit Southern California in October 2011.  My work is influenced by the idea of dualities: exploring the subtle, divergent and extreme forces in our physical and psychic surroundings.  Living in the Bay Area satiates my need for such explorations to a great extent, but observing the sublime at the noted sites will be crucial for my upcoming project.  I have seen the North— misty afternoon light in Fern Canyon on the North Coast; oysters, lighthouses, and radiant sunlit beaches in Marin; sifting, porous, volcanic rock and craggy mountains at Lassen Volcanic National Park.  This will be my first chance to truly explore and document the South.

Especially since moving my art studio into my home, I’m finding it increasingly important to expose myself to a variety of visual textures & languages, to complement this comforting sameness of home.  Traveling from lush islands to stark desert in the course of ten days, spanning geographical distances of hundreds of miles, I will be able to witness the diverse settings of our state, at sites crucial to California’s natural history.

While traveling I will work mainly in the medium of photography, focusing on themes of transformation, re-invention, uncertainty, perspective.  This trip will be a meditation on the nature of abstract and essential beauty in our landscape, a documentation of material vs. natural wealth, and will be a key departure from my more well-known drawings, painting and collage work, while nevertheless dealing with the operations of abstraction and visual poetry.

For the months March through May, I will be setting out on a cross-country journey via car with my dog, Lolly, to find photographs and videos on the open road. I will be making a large, yet weaving loop across the country starting in San Francisco, down to LA, Nevada, Utah, across the Southwest, Oklahoma, the South, Atlanta, up into the Smokey Mountains, to upstate New York, under the Great Lakes, across the top of the United States, and then from Seattle back to San Francisco. I have saved part of the money I need to embark on this trip, but I am trying to raise the rest.

I’ve chosen the title of my project to be “In Search of the Miraculous”, which comes from a project with the same name by the artist Bas Jan Ader, who set sail in his one- person ship in 1975 from the east coast to Europe. His voyage captures a similar romantic motive and adventurous pursuit that I not only admire, but wish to pursue. I believe he was setting out to solve a mystery for himself and leaving his artistic practice open for an intuitive process to take hold. I wish to pay homage to his playful spirit and daring determination as I drive cross-country discovering new places and making artwork as I go. Unlike the great Bas Jan Ader's fateful trip, I'm hoping to return safe and sound! Much of my work is inspired by finding and constructing scenarios from the simple magic of everyday life, and I desire to push my practice further by leaving it up to chance on the open road, allowing my ideas to change with every town and terrain.

Finally, I will be keeping a blog, updating it with photos and writing from my trip. Also, I will share the recommendations people give me for my trip, along with the ultimate road trip mixes I receive. You can follow me at this blog address and see my artwork here.

From early on in my art practice my interests have aired on the side of trespassing disciplines—visual, theoretical, and narrative crossings with intention to address an interstitial space of engagement. Since establishing [ 2nd floor projects ] an artist-run project space located in San Francisco in 2007, twenty writers have participated within the exhibitions—with six upcoming in 2011. My programming includes invitations to commission writers nationally to produce an edition—essays, personal narratives, interviews, poetry, or mixed genre in the form of hand-crafted broad sheets or chapbooks. My intention is to encourage an engagement with the artists’ works from the writer’s point of departure—distal, rather than from the traditional essay model, such as an exhibition catalogue. I design and print a limited run in-house of 100 for each exhibition on archival quality papers. The writers are also invited to give a reading during the duration of the exhibition, or send a recording if they are not in the area.

Due to the caliber of the art writing, for the past two years [ 2nd floor projects ] has been invited to Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair. One’s full participation in the the book fair (working alone), makes it impossible to investigate New York’s vast resources, nor inside the breadth of the fair which is an overwhelming feat to experience and peruse. Thus, I would like to travel to New York “specifically to research” special collections, independent publishing, small presses (such as, Ugly Duckling Presse), and archives of artist made books by visiting the New York Public Library (artist book collections), New York Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter Inc., Granary Books, D.A.P., Specific Object, and Dexter Sinister’s Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore, to name a few.

The $1000 allotted will cover the cost of airfare and accommodations.

Thank you for your consideration and this nomination.

Los Angeles

My work draws from a wide variety of source material including science fiction and horror film, the baroque and the grotesque, modernist color theory, cults and subcultures, utopias and dystopias, as well as radical ideologies and conspiracy theory. I am proposing travel to Los Angeles for research and development purposes related to my ongoing projects that engage with the excessive and fantastic visual language of contemporary film. This research focuses on often hidden elements of the Los Angeles film industry such as the special effects studios and prop houses required for fabricating the natural via artificial means.

Matt Borruso is a visual artist, bibliophile, and San Francisco native. His work has been widely exhibited at venues such as Steven Wolf Fine Arts and 2nd Floor Projects in San Francisco, the Manhattan Cultural Council and Derek Eller in New York City, and Sister in Los Angeles. Borruso’s paintings and drawings have been featured in Beautiful Decay magazine and Instant City, and his xeroxed punk-rock flyers have appeared in Fucked Up and Photocopied: The Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement and Punk Is Dead: Punk Is Everything! He received his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. He currently teaches in the Painting and Critical Studies departments at SFAI.

Visit Often

As an outsider, do we go to a place to see the scenes seen, or do we go for the inside scoop, the out of the way the forgotten or the truly coveted locations?

I’ve watched recently in major mediated projects like the ones on food channel and bravo the display of the insider’s viewpoint, laid bare. Should we allow ourselves to lose this? Or are we sharing it?  I’d like to take a trip to a place where I get to make evidence of how these places we “out” react to being outed.  Id visit a friend in a specific place and we would stand watch and document visitors that seem out of place, confronting them and asking how they gained this privileged information. Then we’d visit the place ourselves and ask the caretaker of such a place as to the effect they’d noticed on increased/decreased support and how that shift in demographics has altered their business.

This work while mostly research, would help me understand something I’ve asked mostly of visitors to my work, How did you get here, where did you go in the work, and are you pleased or displeased at how it connected to your own personal vision of the world.

The money would pay for plane ticket, rental of a car and a small compensation/stipend to Local Talent for their time and information. We would also be patrons, the bill of our visit covered by me, grant. Souvenirs and photo processing might be needed for a potential public sharing of adventures. In a place TBA.

Viewers viewed, always carry a mirror, Travel often, create special experiences with friends include others.

Places I might visit:

Memphis, TN: Local Talent: Hamlett Dobbins

Chicago, IL: Local Talent: Todd Pavilisko

Iowa City, IA: Local Talent: David Dunlap

New York, NY: Local Talent: Kurt Lightner

Miami, FL: Local Talent: Jim Drain

Cleveland, OH: Local Talent: Kristin Bly

Los Angeles, CA: Local Talent: Lisa Auerbach

St Louis, MO: Local Talent: Tom Reed