Swap Meet: A Cross-Cultural Lens ProjectAuthor(s): Patricia WoodSource: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 87-88Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777889 .

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'Alika McNicoll. He Kuleana Kaumaha,A Heavy Responsibility, 1996. Concrete, wire, and flowers. 15 x 15 x 5 (38.1 x 38.1 x 12.7).

How may art make a difference in people's lives? A primary goal of the

Expanded Arts foundation class at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa is to rearticulate the role of the artist in the community. The curriculum, developed by Peter Chamberlain and myself, attempts to foster a broad understanding and awareness of the interdependent relationships among cultural, political, and religous aspects of society.

Because of its success in encouraging students to explore these ideas, as well as its versatility, the Cross-Cultural Lens Project is often the initial

assignment in the foundation class. Students choose a partner who seems to

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have contrasting or complementary characteristics, background, or gen- der. Over the next few weeks the students' instructors guide them

through a series of stages. In the first stage, the students exchange information and collect abundant research about their respective backgrounds through photographs, books, interviews, sketches, and found objects. As the partners record, document, and respond to

the differences between their identi-

ties, their explorations reveal com- monalities as well. Using paper, art

supplies, and ordinary household

materials, they distill the research

they collect into numerous sheets of visual and textual data that may

be further manipulated, combined, fragmented, exaggerated, rescaled, super-

imposed, or juxtaposed in a playful, nonjudgmental process of exploration. Each experiment opens additional avenues of investigation and generates countless possibilities that are fresh and surprising to the artists.

Patricia Wood

Swap Meet: A Cross-Cultural Lens

Project

The information will not make sense until the next stage of the project, when the students establish relationships and pat- terns between selected notations and materials. As they sift, cull, and organize the information they have collected, they clarify their ideas. Up to this point we have reminded the students not to speculate on the ultimate presentation of their work. Only in

the final stages of the project, when the information is shaped into a material presentation, do we reveal to the students the general category in which their project will be presented. This category differs each semester; it

is typically an object from daily life and may range from kites to books, lunch

boxes, or clothing. Because the project takes an open-ended approach to media, the students must decide which materials, techniques, and formal elements

will most powerfully impart their concept. They may elect to incorporate time-based and/or kinesthetic components. Visual and material considerations

develop in tandem with critical strategies in a mutally dependent praxis. In one semester the medium was bodywear, which permitted students to

87 art journal

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investigate the concept of donned or shed layers of identity. Culminating in a fashion show staged in the Art Building's bamboo courtyard, partners strolled

together wearing the clothing made for them as their counterparts introduced them through the artwork. A video of the fashion show, along with the body- wear, was then installed in a gallery designed to resemble a flea market. This

exhibition was dubbed the Swap Meet.

Through this project, students began to gain an understanding of their own identities in a cross-cultural context. For example, a male student of

Hawaiian ancestry made a concrete and wire hat for his female partner from

Ireland to indicate that she bears the weight of violent conflict in her home-

land (similar to Hawaiian struggles); the flower signals hope. The Hawaiian

student has an Irish surname but knew nothing of this aspect of his heritage, so his partner made him a plaid Irish ceremonial kilt/Hawaiian malo (loin-

cloth) of woven and layered palm husks, sepia-toned photographs, scrim, and

threads. Their art had spun a filament connecting two voices, traversing two

cultures.

By carefully refining the process of investigation, by adapting appropriate media and techniques to content, and by transmuting the informative into

the experiential, the Cross-Cultural Lens Project generates energy and emotion.

From this fertile mulch springs new levels of understanding and action-a

creative recycling of meaningful discourse for artist and participant alike.

Patricia Wood teaches expanded arts, video/electronic media, and theory and criticism at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Her intermedia artwork is community based and historically informed.

Susanna Heller

The Thumbnail: A Project for

Teaching aVisual Shorthand

How is it possible to teach students to respond aggressively and inventively to

their visual surroundings, to record their deeply personal experience of space? How may one help students develop their own vocabulary of visual short-

hand? How may one help them develop powerful connections to the visual

world, in order to strengthen their intuitive and holistic

awareness of space and to avoid a simple listing or rendering of the namable objects present within it? The Thumbnail

Project deals with these difficulties by prioritizing space and movement, thereby shifting the hierarchies of how we

describe "place." It begins with a series of drawings that

sound logically impossible. These drawings can be achieved

only through exaggeration, reinvention, editing, dismissal of any sense of

right or wrong, and breaking rules both literally and metaphorically. I begin by asking students to draw frames of various shapes and sizes

on a single sheet of paper. I then ask them to draw the entire room and

everything in it (including what is behind them) in one of the frames in

thirty seconds. Encouraging them to be curious, playful, and wildly inventive

with their drawing tool, I tell them to look at all the extremes of the room,

including the farthest corners, the ceiling, and so on, and to consider their

own size and density in relation to that of the entire room. We discuss the

difference between what we think about what we see and what we are actu-

ally seeing; we discuss the room as a figure and how these drawings are like

88 SPRING 1999

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