“Resident X” Takes The Art Out Of The Studio

Say you’re in a conference call and you start doodling on the piece of paper in front of you. Say you cover the whole thing with doodles, and start doing that during every conference call.

Or say you’re a commuter at a bus stop and something — a soda can and a plastic bag arranged just so — catches your eye. You take a picture of it with your phone. Say you do this every day. Are you an artist?

You just might be, suggests ​“Resident X,” a small exhibition curated by Sarah Fritchey at Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown that runs through Feb. 24.

The exhibition shows work by six artists — Jonathan Gitelson, Keith Johnson, Katie Jurkiewicz, Sam Messer, Carmen Papalia, and Dushko Petrovich — who all produced the work in what the exhibit’s accompanying text playfully calls ​“accidental residencies” — trains, cars, planes, and yes, the workplace.

In Gitelson’s The Sweet Spot, a large mural offers a bird’s eye view of his train line in Chicago, but it’s the journal documenting 50 days of commuting that draws more attention. A sign invites viewers to ​“please touch.” Those who do are treated to a day-to-day glimpse into Gitelson’s commuting thoughts, which may strike some (including this reporter) who are familiar with commuting as eerily familiar. His attention to detail — where he stood on the platform, where he entered the train, how full the train was — is itself evidence that he’s been doing the same commute for a while. But the notes are then full of funny details. ​“Salt on platform has partially covered the numbers that I wrote on the wooden planks, I had to clear then with my shoe” he writes on Jan. 26. (When did he take the time to number the planks in the first place?) Mar. 6: ​“Beautiful weather, people aren’t huddled under the heat lamp today. I am trying the southern side of the platform to mix things up.” Apr. 16: ​“Bought a transit card with the brand new credit card machine they installed, the guy who used it before me got ripped off for $5.”

The journal is thought-provoking in part for what it isn’t. Gitelson could have filled the pages with thoughts about what he might do when he’s not commuting — thoughts about projects in progress, or what he’s going to do on the weekend. Something to escape the daily commute. Instead, he plunges headlong into it. Though maybe immersing yourself in the details of the commute, making it into an art project, is one way to escape it — a way to avoid the existential despair that can set in if you look at the big picture, the possible detriments to your health, the loss of time, the contemplation of the other things, any other things, you could be doing instead.

The bitterness of commuting is in full flower in Dushko Petrovich’s piece, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, a not-exactly-fictional newspaper Petrovich created in 2015 and still maintains online. The paper starts with sobering figures about the financial situations of adjunct professors — according to the paper, as of 2015, almost one-third of part-time faculty were living below or near the poverty line and the families of almost 100,000 part-time faculty members were enrolled in public assistance programs. But article after article is shot through with mordant humor, from the headlines on down (e.g., Ted Mineo’s piece, ​“Blur of Chobanis”; the pseudonymous Cloudesley Shovell’s ​“Euro Adjuncts Nearly as Badly Screwed as Yanks”). There is Kevin Temple’s ​“Adjunct Sudoku,” which the instructions describe as ​“just like regular sudoku but pointless and unfair. You may only enter the smallest numerals, 1, 2, and 3. Under no circumstances are you allowed to write 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9. When you are finished, the puzzle will be, at best, one third complete. The experience will be disheartening, but remember: it is you who chose to play Adjunct Sudoku.”

One of the commuters Petrovich interviews in Adjunct Commuter Weekly is artist Sam Messer, labeled as a ​“platinum commuter” because ​“for nine years, he commuted from LA to Yale for an adjunct position.” (As of 2015, he had moved to New York and still commutes; ​“to be honest it takes almost as long to get from Brooklyn to Yale. There’s not much difference, oddly enough,” he reported then.) The interview is full of the kind of humor that dominates Adjunct Commuter Weekly. ​“Do you have any advice for up-and-coming, newly emerging adjunct commuters?” the interviewer asks. ​“Yeah. Get a real job,” Messer says.

But amid the humor is some tantalizing information about what Messer would do on his commuting flights. ​“Back then you could actually do lots of things on the airplane. I used to — not on the overnight, but on the way home, because I needed the light — I used to do what my friend called photoplasms. I would take negatives and tape them to the window, and I would bring a little can of turpentine and an etching needle and a little paintbrush, and I would work into the negatives, draw on them. Then when I was at Yale I would pay a grad student to print them for me…. I used to bring wet paintings — you could bring a lot of shit on the airplane, like enormous things, and nobody really would say anything.”

“Resident X” includes some of the fruits of Messer’s in-flight artmaking. Some of the altered photographs involve recognizable figures — a very pregnant Uma Thurman, the author Paul Auster. Then there are more arresting images. The outline of a man etched into a photograph of a dog sitting on a sidewalk. A man drawn into a photo of a chair. A pair of electric blue arms drawn into a photograph of a man. They all convey a keen sense of absence, of loss, of fleetingness, that don’t require knowing the circumstances of their creation to be felt. But knowing that Messer was on a plane when he made them invites speculation as to how the circumstances affected the creation of the images. Were they response to his surroundings? A reaction to the life he was missing down below? Or were the hours on the airplane simply the time Messer had to create art? Maybe the cross-country flight was even a refuge. Finding a specific answer is unimportant; the speculation offers an avenue into appreciating the work.

Gitelson’s, Petrovich’s, and Messer’s pieces point out how much time we spend getting to and from our jobs. Katie Jurkiewicz’s pieces highlight just how much time we spend, well, at work. Jurkiewicz is Artspace’s PR coordinator in addition to being a visual artist, and in an interesting glimpse into how the organization is run, the exhibition’s notes reveal that ​“since her arrival in 2013, Jurkiewicz has opted to make drawings rather than take notes on the printed agendas” during weekly staff meetings. These agendas, festooned with sketches, are arranged in a cubicle around a computer. Another host of questions arise. Are the drawings a distraction from the work as PR coordinator, or do they actually help Jurkiewicz focus? Do we work better if we’re also allowed to have fun and express ourselves? How many people can make their jobs into art?

The questions broaden further in Carmen Papalia’s piece, which ​“explores non-visual learning as a place of residency.” Whether the concept of the exhibition breaks down or deepens at this point probably depends on your tolerance for abstraction. But Papalia’s pieces, a series of videos, are fascinating as performances. In one video, the legally blind artist replaces his white cane with a megaphone, relying on others to reach a specified address in his hometown. In another video, Papalia asks participants to form a human chain and take a walking tour through a city with their eyes closed, using their other senses to navigate and perceive the environment around them. As interesting as it is to watch, it’s easy to imagine how much more interesting it would be to take part.

Likewise, the notes to Keith Johnson’s photography of the landscape around the Genesee River in New York State state that the artist ​“excavates memory as a site of residency.” A longer note reveals that this was a necessary dodge; technically speaking, Johnson created the photographs in the exhibit during an artists’ residency, which put them outside even the loosely defined concept of the exhibit. There was nothing accidental about it. Yet here the explanation need not have been so abstract. Johnson grew up in the area of the Genesee River, an accident of birth and geography. Had he not grown up there, he might never know the Genesee River, never become enamored of its 180 miles from Pennsylvania to the shores of Lake Ontario. Johnson’s photography, simple in its execution but drawing from the landscape of his childhood, drives home the simple but profound idea that drives the exhibit — that art can be made anywhere, by anyone, out of just about anything. Time, money, a studio, an artist’s retreat? These are all good things. But really, all you need is a pen and a blank spot on an office memo that calls to be something more.

“Resident X” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through Feb. 24. Click here for hours and more details.