Jane Street Residency
IN REAL TIME + PLACE: a collaboration
A collaborative project and residency at the Jane Steet Art Center in Saugerties, NY.
Jo Ganter worked with the Scottish musicians, Raymond MacDonald and George Burt, American pianist, Marilyn Crispell, and New York artist Melinda Stickney Gibson, during a month-long residency in July 2022.
The residency provided space, time, and support, for a genuinely experimental workshop. The musicians and artists worked together to create paintings, drawings and installations to be interpreted in musical performances without any preordained result. Each artist created starting points for images or sounds not knowing which other artist in the group would respond to it. In this way, while not every artist was involved in every piece of work, strong collaborative partnerships were formed to create mini-series of images, Ganter working with Crispell on a suite of monochrome ink paintings, and with MacDonald on a suite of colourful abstracts in paint and pen.
The Jane Street Art Center provided two exhibition spaces: the main art gallery gave a neutral white setting for working and exhibiting images. A grand piano occupied the space allowing musical experimentation alongside image-making and musical performances structured by the paintings shown next to it.
The Newberry Gallery demanded a more site-specific response from the artists. Originally a '5 and dime' store on the main high street of Saugerties, the space was large and not yet fully refurbished. The sheer scale of the floor provided a challenge and a great potential for exhibiting a series of large works.
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Ganter, Crispell, MacDonald and Burt worked on a series of gestural ink paintings for the walls of the Newberry Gallery. Each artist made a spontaneous brushstroke and then passed the brush to the next artist to make one in response. It became a continuous graphic score around the walls of the old shop floor which the musicians moved around as they played it.
Artefacts from the time of the '5,10, and 25 cent' store remained in the space and Raymond MacDonald worked with Melinda Stickney Gibson to produce a central, sculptural piece for the space made from the arranged objects and a number of paintings on parchment that hung from the ceiling onto the floor by them. This assemblage worked both as graphic score and percussion instrument. The musicians and spectators of the performance playing the metal cogs, rollers and tin sheeting during the performance.
