At the Open Wabi Make-Shift Residency, we were asked to respond to the space in some way. The space was a gigantic warehouse once used to house a type of manufacturing. We came in to do our own manufacturing. I was primarily interested in the size of the space, and how difficult it was to grasp using only my eyes. I engaged the space using my body as a locator from which to gauge the building.
Bio
Emily Harris is a Queens-based artist and a current MFA Candidate at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has exhibited her work in venues in New York; Ai Gallery and Bridge Art Fair, Chicago, IL;and internationally at 2B Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; Galeria Z in Bratislava, Slovakia, The Museum of Arts & Crafts Itami, Itami-shi, Japan and Galeria Ajolote Arte Contemporaneo, Guadalajara, Mexico.She most recently participated in a performance at The Great Hall, Cooper Union, NYC titled Roaming Urban Soundscapes where she and Paul Sadowski re-staged Cage’s 49 Waltzes for 5 Boroughs as part of the NYMS Anniversary and John Cage Centennial in September, 2012.
Where to find
Work from the Open Wabi experience
Body Language of Scale
I continued to use my body as a locator to measure the space. Without some sort of locator, it is difficult to determine (especially in an image) the actual size of something. Thinking of my body as the locating tool, I moved away from the camera in increments and presented ways to embody a number of spatial terms.
Sphere
Thinking about what to do next, I found myself shuffling my feet in an outline of a large circle on the floor. In part as an unpremeditated reaction to the chalk square, Miguel had drawn on the cinder block wall, the circle became a sphere or cylinder because it implicated the space above it, and consequently the space below in its relationship to Miguel’s square, the other shapes in the building and its position in the picture.
