Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Road Trip!

I need your help! For the Dallas project, I need to collect thoughts, quotes, statistics, personal stories, etc., about cars, roads, oil, peak oil, the relationship between oil and war (if you believe there is one), and other topics of that nature. Please send them to me at the email address list under my contact information.

My plan? Well, the exhibition theme is Gestures of Resistance, which follows the notion that slowness, such as is illustrated by activities such as knitting, can be a political act of resistance to the dominant culture that favors speed and immediate gratification. When I think about that, as applied to Dallas (and yes, Mr. Picky, I do think Dallas can be seen as an epicenter of sprawl if you think globally or at least nationally), I have to think about cars and oil. And when I think about cars and oil, I have to think about war and environmental destruction. So I want to make something that uses knitting to discuss all of that. My idea is to knit a strip of cloth that will incorporate the words I collect in a kind of narrative, linear in shape but non-linear in the tale it tells. The strip will mimic the strip of paint along the side of a road (white or yellow--have to find out), by knitting the text in the colour with a black/grey background. Think of a very, very long scarf. A very, very long, narrative scarf. And I will install it along the side of the road where people will have to (gasp) walk along beside it in order to read it. And by very, very long, I mean....a mile?

Oh, Patti? Are you out there?

2 comments:

Xxx. Xxxx said...

Wow. Sounds brilliant Robyn. What do you need me to do? :)

I met a woman who teaches art at the middle school here who crochets handbags out of plastic shopping bags. She cuts them in strips making big circles, which I think she then crochets doubled-up. Not terribly hand/wrist-friendly work, but man, would that make a nice shiny white strip...

Unknown said...

ah, burma shave meets the beaux tapestries...

the stripes on the road..
right side --White--
left side Yellow
(center yellow)
(double center line --means no crossing yellow line. (single/dotted means you can --being a NYC driver, the thing i hate most is passing on a 2 lane road.. (since its the thing i do least!)

color could indicate political sides too (the right/the left...)

(or if you have them reversed, it could indicate going the wrong way down the road (another political message!)

and distance is measure in time.. (no one lives 10 miles away, they live 5 minutes away, or a half hour down the road.)

with knitting time also equal 'distance' how many hours (even with a knitting machine to knit) a mile of "line" (how many miles of yarn too!)

and here is a a clock that measures not just time, but cost, (of oil, of the war, etc.)

http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php