cube@canal park

Identity, Location, Artists

THIS PLACE HAS A VOICE

Cube @ Canal Park Situated at the south end of Canal Park (M and 2nd SE) is a 20-foot cube equipped with data projectors and connected to audio speakers dispersed throughout the southern quadrant of the park. The project aims to give a voice to the area, to the people and their lives, to the streets and their character, to the relationships between this neighborhood and other communities in DC and around the world. Under the curatorial leadership of Bruce McKaig, a team of local artists is connecting with local members of the community to discover personal stories and experiences that have built and continue to shape this neighborhood. This local input is examined and repackaged via the experience and vision of the cube artists, producing videos, photographs, interviews, slide shows, drawings, performances, installations, and oral histories. Works are available on this website, and selected works will be projected on the cube nightly, starting after sunset and running until 11:30, every night from now until the September 20th Event Day.

The Cube@Canal Park had a turbulent beginning. Artists began working on the project in 2012, but construction delays and administrative complications pushed public projections forward until summer 2014. The first to produce content for the cube were visual artist Bruce McKaig and audio artist Adrienne Penebre, who spent several months recording images and sounds in the area, producing this 20 minute conceptual piece (November 2012) that moves from light and shadow to color and shape then movement, character and identity.

click to view Cube Artists' Films

Janelle Fernandez

Bruce McKaig

Ira Tattelman

Chaya Shapiro

Dawn Whitmore Create a photographic story of the community, with a particular interest in the residents at the Capper Senior Center. I envision the work to be a large narrative on the many different people and backgrounds that make up the community, combining still photographs, interviews, and videos. Dawn Whitmore was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1983. She graduated from the Corcoran School of Art in 2005 during which time she also completed a semester abroad at the Camberwell College of the Arts (2004) in London. Her photographs have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries throughout the United States, Lyon, France and London.

Janelle Fernandez Through photographs and interviews, I plan to examine the physical environment and infrastructure of the neighborhood. I want to explore the ways in which the physical space – streets, houses, offices, parks, businesses, etc. – affect the lives of the people who inhabit them, and likewise, how the history and culture of the neighborhood is (or is not) reflected in the infrastructure itself. Janelle Fernandez is a visual artist with a background in sociology. She is interested in using photography to explore concepts of identity and culture as expressed through the mundane. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the region.

Chaya Shapiro Cities are dynamic. They are made up of environments that live and breathe, undergoing change, evolution, growth and destruction. We experience these environments as neighborhoods, downtowns, parks, industries and planned and improvised spaces. But what does this dynamism mean for placemaking? Ideally, building a place’s identity and meaning is a collaborative, context-led, and adaptable process to bring about the collective vision of the community. How is this happening, if at all, in the shifting
cultural and physical landscape of the near Southeast neighborhood? Through my conversations with residents – newer, established and returning – the following questions have come to shape how I think about neighborhood change. What is this neighborhood’s rich history? Who has agency in place-making? How is the community re-imagining and building place? How are the past and present coming together to define the future? This series of video portraits taps into the rich narratives of people tied to this area of DC. The stories they share add layers to the life of the neighborhood, once the center of the District, and keep us questioning, what and who makes a community?

Kent Gay The world is in flux and our environment tells a story of change. The past, present and future are simultaneously written on the urban landscape, documenting the material history of human activity and place-making. I am fascinated by the rapidly changing urban landscape of Southeast DC and drawn to the open-ended, provisional and transforming nature of its construction. A place is created, shaped and lived in many and varied ways by many people, as minutes, hours and years pass. If I spend enough time in one place, I see some things change and some things stay the same. The sun will sweep by, people will walk by, talk with each other, play, paint a mural, build a building, or tear it down. I see how everything has its own identity and spirit - a tree, a fence, a sign - and I see how it all fits together. I am creating panoramic drawings and animations of Southeast's urban spaces. Over several visits, I am exploring and drawing and discovering what makes them unique. I am meeting people and learning what connects them to this place. I want to express both the enduring and ephemeral qualities of these places.

Bruce McKaig I am more curious to see what a photograph can be than what a photograph can be of, exploring direct and unrepeatable experiences. I am attracted to meticulous processes that embrace elements of chance and surprise, and usually produce one-of-a-kind results. I am trying to discover more than control and consider photography itself my principle subject matter. Most photographs successfully avoid the truth and fascinate me because their lies are so plausible. For This Place Has A Voice, I am exploring historical and contemporary photographs as well as socioeconomic data to produce images, videos, and infographs.

Ira Tattelman As an artist and licensed architect, my work is a dialogue with space. These site-specific projects reveal the layering and juxtapositions that occur over time in built spaces. Attentive to the political, social and cultural implications of a chosen place, I create an improvised version of reality. The evolving installations comment on the impermanence of boundaries, investigate the production of place and interpret the various ways we inhabit space. In Southeast DC, this neighborhood has constantly been remade. How then do we remember its disappearing history? For my project, I tie together maps, drawings, photographs, newspaper articles and witness reports. Arranging and collaging gathered materials, I remove the items from their original settings and reframe them in new combinations to offer my documentation and interpretation of this special place. In L’Enfant’s 1791 plan of Washington DC, the Washington City Canal was a big part of the landscape. While Canal Park brings some of those markings forward, I hope to reengage contemporary users with some of the neighborhood’s prior uses and inhabitants. There is no fixed narration, no agreed upon way to record and capture changes. Stories move through time, meanings shift. The traces of past interactions and interventions help shape the spaces we share today.

Aaron Goggans For me, art and activist are inextricably linked. I seek to find the stories shouted from the roof tops but falling on deaf ears. I seek the profound in the overlooked. I seek the marvelous in the everyday. I’m often fascinated by the way sunlight dances on the Anacostia River from the 11 street bridge and am often over whelmed by the beauty of a lost piece of art spray painted on a forgotten wall in a rarely visited neighborhood. I am consistently amazed by the lives of everyday people and enriched by the stories they so openly share with me. I firmly believe that the ability to wonder and be amazed is a muscle that will wilt if left unused. For me life becomes dull and meaningless without wonder and amazement. I also firmly believe that we are all each individually and collectively responsible for the state of our world. More than anything, I want my art to be a personal exercise regiment for our ability to wonder and to inspire others to think critically about beauty, struggle, wonder and agitation.

Jon Lee We consume things. We consume each other.
FEED ME is the simple act of having someone feed me a meal in front of an audience. It is an exploration of the absurdity and importance of being fed. Each performance has its own energy and story. It is a micro-drama played between two people doing a natural thing in an unnatural circumstance. On the Septemeber 20th Event Day, I will be fed by project curator Bruce McKaig: a cake with edible images from Bruce’s childhood.

Magus Magnus Documents become sound, books become food. Here, words don’t answer to Place, but inform internal (digestive) and external (aural) environments for a Day in the Park: no soapbox speechifying , but that’s not quite the same as saying, “No comment.” Magus Magnus is a writer and poet whose books include The Re-echoes, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, and Verb Sap. Several of his poems and an idyll have been anthologized in Pearson Longman’s university-level English textbook, Literature.

Ward Tietz We have long recognized that any given history is necessarily incomplete and provisional. Who asks, who answers, whose story is told, whose voice is heard—--it’s well known that these aspects of a place’s history are subject to money, power and politics, but it’s less obvious how a history is subject to larger ideological forces, such as time. History’s ideological fault line runs through time. Modernity represents time as linear, progressive and rational. While much of culture fits this model, much also resists it. Mircea Eliade recognized that culture also embraces “an eternal return,” conceptualizations of time that stress cyclical, recursive, restorative and eternal forces. These forces present themselves largely through myth. The neighborhoods around the newly constructed Canal Park have seen great change, and this change has highlighted a need to know and preserve its history, and if Eliade is right, its myth. On September 20, I will roll a series of large, three-dimensional letters in Roll Up, Roll Out, Roll On through the park—rolling, metaphorically, from history into myth-- using letters as entry points into spoken texts that respond to physical and metaphysical aspects of the park as it engages the area’s myth, memory and aspiration for the future.

The cube is owned and operated by the
Canal Park Development Association

Initial funding provided by the DC Commission
on the Arts and Humanities

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Cube@Canal Park

Curator and Lead Artist: Bruce McKaig

Team Artists:

Chaya Shapiro
Kent Gay

Janelle Fernandez

Jon Lee

Gowri Koneswaran

Adrienne Penebre

Initial funding provided by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

Capitol Hill Alphabet Animal Art Project

Project Manager: Hannah Jacobson

Art Director: Bruce McKaig

Team Artists:

(E) Emu Elizabeth Baldwin
(D) Dog John Yanson

(F) Falcarius Charles Bergen

(S) Spider Breon Gilleran

(I) Ibis Evan Reed

(L) Lady Bug Susan Champeny

(K) Koala Davide Prete

(V) Viceroy Butterfly Novie Anne Trump

(N) Narwhal Undine Brod

(G) Grasshopper Carolina Mayorga

Funded by the DC Department of Transportation (DDOT)

Administered by the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW)

Talking Pictures

Project Manager: Bruce McKaig

Project Historian: Mara Cherkasky

Funded by the Humanities Council of DC (DCHC)

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THIS PLACE HAS A VOICE

© 2014 This Place Has A Voice / thisplacehasavoice.info

Bruce McKaig, 504 Constitution Avenue NE

Washington DC 20002
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Website by PIXI DESIGN

DC Department of Transportation

Capitol Hill Arts Workshop

DC Humanities Council

DC Commision on the Arts and Humanties