Visual art made accessible, part 2
by Beth
Think a writer who is blind has nothing to learn from a visual artist? Think again!
I wrote earlier about an architect friend who found a way to make his art accessible to people like me, who are blind. Now I’m back with another friend in the visual arts whose art is accessible in another way.
That’s Jennifer, undaunted by the rain.
I met visual artist Jennifer Lanski during my writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC). Sharing meals with Jennifer and her fellow visual artists at VSC gave me a new appreciation for art and drawing, and I was all ears when Jennifer shared ideas for a new time/temperature series. That series opened as an online exhibition on New Year’s Day this year. It’s called 2014 in 2015 and I’ve been going to the site every day so far in 2015.
Let me try and explain. At the end of 2013, Jennifer decided to go outside and draw every single day in 2014 as an extension of her time/temperature series. Each and every day in 2014, Jennifer determined how long she’d be out there drawing by the temperature outside that day. If it was 22º Fahrenheit at the moment she began drawing, she’d be out there 22 minutes. On days it was 90º? She’d draw for an hour and a half. She couldn’t give me one single answer on how she decided to do this. Instead, she gave me many:
- She wanted to explore her new neighborhood, having moved to Fairfax, Ohio, from California only 6 months earlier.
- She wanted to be allowed the time and space to draw; to demand that from her family, herself, and the world.
- She wanted to make herself be outside every day, despite her instinct to huddle inside through the long, cold, grey, winter months.
- She wanted to challenge herself.
- She wanted to see how this daily project would develop.
- She wanted to see how she’d respond to the struggles that would inevitably come from taking on this project.
- She was interested in what it means to be an artist in the world in the 21st century. So she wanted to put herself, as an artist, into the world to find out.
As 2014 was coming to a close, Jennifer says the question of how to show the work kept nagging at her. She’d been convinced by other artists that she needed to show every single drawing from the project, but she couldn’t figure out how. And where.
“One morning I woke up and suddenly had the solution,” she wrote me in an email. “I would have an online show, but instead of showing all the drawings at once, the show would change daily and run for the entire year of 2015.” So starting on January 1, a new drawing appears online each day, and the next day a new one comes up to replace the one from the day before. The drawing that appears each day is the one she drew exactly one year earlier.
Jennifer knew that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate her drawings. “But maybe there is something you could get out of these drawings, too,” she said, explaining that along with every day’s image she’d be printing a “transcript” of the small text that appears below each drawing. “You’ll discover the place, date, time, description of the weather, the temperature, my clothing, and then sensory and environmental information from the experience of drawing that day,” she said. I “met poet Evie Shockley at the Vermont Studio Center when I was there again in July, and she said my text was poetry, though I’m not sure I would go that far.”
To see Jennifer’s show in its entirety, you have to visit the website every day in 2015. I’ve been doing that so far this year, and reading her transcript is a neat parallel to what her experience was like every day last year…but I don’t have to go outside! I’ve made a resolution to visit 2014in2015.com every morning so I can start each day with Jennifer’s poetry — consider joining me to see/read about a new drawing (the image she drew that same day last year) every day. If you do, weigh in here from time to time to let me know what the drawings look like.