Push the Envelope
Dynamo Project Space, Thessaloniki, Greece
Spoke Gallery, Chicago, 2010
Piece: Correspondence Piece
Description: ‘Push the Envelope’ (a project by Rachel Moore) brought together a group of artists working in Chicago, Thessaloniki, and Athens, for an intensive collaboration in Spring 2010. The three weeks began with an opening exhibit at Dynamo Project Space in Thessaloniki, Greece, and evolved through a series of discussions held via Skype between the artists in Greece and those meeting at Spoke Gallery in Chicago. The majority of the project, however, lived in the spirited discussions and exchange on the project’s blog where we struggled with issues of communication, political and social upheaval during the Greek economic crisis, and general questions of how to span cultural and geographic differences to find a collaborative meeting ground.
For the closing exhibit, we interspersed the new work generated during the three weeks with the original work from the opening.
Piece: “Penpal”
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011
Show: The Space Between
Description: “The artists from ‘Push the Envelope’ reunited to make new work for a show at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. We chose to create a video installation focusing on some of the most common refrains uttered during our original video conferences, “Are you still there? Can you hear us?” which came to act as a metaphor for the collaboration as a whole.”
