Home/Body Imaging: Flatlining

It’s been a strange day. For the past few weeks I’ve been Abby Robinson, Photo Practitioner. But now the HomeBase IV project is over; all the wonderful artists and the staff have packed up and moved out. The site at 232 East Broadway is once again deserted and restored to its neglected, shabby state. The clinic looks even lonelier and eerier (if that’s possible) than when we all moved in.

My installation Home/Body Imaging was the closest thing I’ve had to a straight job in years. I actually put in 8-hour days at my mash up doctor’s office/photo studio—arriving at noon and leaving at 8pm. Or sometimes later because like physicians everywhere, I’d be constantly behind in my record keeping. In fact, I still am.

Despite the weird-assedness of the clinic, my office suite there felt truly homey—which was perfect for a project that investigated notions of home. Friends, other participating HomeBase artists and people I’d never met before would hang out and talk to each other in my waiting room (often about medical topics or about the ingredients in the Vietnamese candy I mixed in with the Reese peanut butter cups, Starbursts, Tootsie Rolls and Three Musketeers. The usual response after someone bit into one was “yuck” and then insist that others waiting to see me had to try one. Who knew tamarind was such an icebreaker?). It was interesting to schmooze. I liked sitting and working in my office. And I loved shooting photographs in my studio. It was like winning the art world/art work trifecta.

So it’s understandable that I miss my space, my fellow artists, and my “patients”. Working in my actual home is taking a wee bit of readjusting even though the components of Home/Body Imaging are all over my living room and workroom floors. Sadly they’re not consoling in a horizontal layout. In fact you’d need a lot of imagination to turn what could now only be called a mess back into an art piece.

People have called to tell me how much they enjoyed their therapeutic visits and that they’ve hung their Home/Body images somewhere in their houses. I’m delighted that the VIP body parts badges have found good homes.

Meanwhile I’m putting all the pictures in some sort of order. When that’s done, I’ll put some up. I’ll also be looking for other places to do more photo examinations. It’s an idea that was too much fun to let die.

Home/Body Imaging: the installation

Join us for the last week of HomeBase IV - Updated Schedule

Thursday May 21st

4:00 Workshop - HomeBase IV presents “Gatherings”
An exciting hands on interactive experience to see inside and to become part of the HomeBase art site. Participants are invited to experiment with ideas in an exhibition environment. What is public art? How do artists use architecture, history, art, and people to connect the present to the past to create artwork? Come and learn about the art making process and build a unique community art project that will become part of the site Workshop by Marilyn Walters and Pam Saturday

5:00 Site Tour and HB Performances -
Willum Geerts Opera2: Once Size Fits All with Dana Muszkatblit and Adam Margulies

7:00 Can't. Go.Home Theater Evening at HomeBase

Can't.Go.Home - An evening of performances and conversations about going home with playwright David Bar-Katz,and actors Nikole Beckwith,Nandita Chandra,Alex Courtney and David Deblinger

Home is often defined as a place of utmost comfort and belonging. But in modern theater the home is traditionally the place that purports to be those things only to become the location where the opposite occurs.The home is not the place that nurtures, but destroys.The home does not welcome, it expels. It is Freud's Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly". Uncanny. Familiar yet radically strange and other. In Davis Bar-Kat'z piece a concentrated atmosphere composed of the aforementioned qualities envelopes the audience then subjects them to a ten minute compressed experience and examination of home specific to the setting of the HomeBase IV project - located in an abondon clinic on the Lower East Side.

The performance will be followed by a conversation with the actors whom have been performing at HomeBase daily since the opening of the project on May 9th, and will include a reading of an excerpt of a new play by David Deblinger, actor, writer, director, teaching artist and one of four co-founders of the internationally renowned and award winning LABy­rinth Theater Company, inspired by his work with the homeless.

You and Yours, by David Deblinger performed by Sandy Chaplin (of the Tv show Spin City) and Victor Williams of the tv show Kind of Queens

Saturday May 23rd

1:00 site tour

2:00 Guest Speaker - David Deblinger – Home Street Home: a performance and workshop eliciting scenes and stories about “home”(30minutes)

David Deblinger has been hired to perform on film, tv and stage by Martin Scorsesee, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and many others. He currently sits on the board of directors, and is one of four co-founders, of the internationally renowned, and award winning LABy­rinth Theater Company, currently in residence at New York’s Public Theater. He is an actor, writer, director and teaching artist.

4:00 Bus stop opera, by HomeBase team member and artist Dawn Renae Weleski http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/write-an-aria-graduate-and-oh-right-get-married/, http://www.busstopopera.com/performances.html, http://www.busstopopera.com/nyc.html

5:00 -8:00 HB Performances

Gina Bonati inan excerpt from 'Dreams Of Martha Stewart' by Pamela Parker directed by Frank Blocker.

On a pilgrimage (bus) to Turkey HIll,a woman accidentally finds herself
in the unforgettable characters she meets and it's a Good thing.

* Can't.Go.Home. by David Bar Katz, performers - Nikole Beckwith, Nandita Chandra, Alex Courtney, David Deblinger
* 7:00 - 8:00 j. morrison
*Adult content

Sunday May 24th

1:00 Site Tour

2:00 Poetry Reading Curated by Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse


4:00 HB Salon Conversation with Lower East Side Bid, on Art & Culture in the lower east side, and talk with Rich Garr founder of GothamSideWalks. com makes New York City's history relevant through themed, community-based walking tours that reflect the contributions and diversity of notable and everyday New Yorkers on "Art History from the Ghetto to the New Museum"

5:00 - 8:00 Site Tour and HB Performances
* Can.Go.Home. by David Bar Katz, performers - Nikole Beckwith, Nandita Chandra, Alex Courtney, David Deblinger
7:10 / 7:45 pm

A Fan's Notes: Home/Body Imaging, installation @ HomeBase IV and why the HomeBase project is so great

It was terrific fun putting together my waiting room/office/photo studio. But there was one dilemma in propping the waiting room so realistically that people actually thought it was a remnant of the original clinic--having all those requisite gossip magazines around. I now know more than anyone should about Brad, Angelina and Jen, Lindsay and Sam's perpetual sturm und drang, who’s had what body work where, and the outfits worn by baby fashionista Suri Cruise that cost more than anything I own. Not to mention the hook ups, marriages, breakups, weight losses and gains of seemingly countless celebs who all seem to look alike and star on reality TV. And the ridiculous names of their children: Bronx, Honor, Zuma, Kingston and Sunday for openers.

But as it turns out these magazines aren’t the only things that blurred the boundaries between public and private.

My installation was all about mash ups: a doctor’s office morphs into a photo studio, the real overlaps with the faux, and the border between the communal and the intimate becomes remarkably porous. People live in their skin and doctors and photographers both at home examining people but not usually in quite in the same way. Medical professionals peer at bodies at a distance usually reserved for lovers. In Home/Body Imaging and in my performative role as photo practitioner, I get to look at people’s skin in as intimate a way as a doctor’s. And I too get to hear personal histories and stories (which I protect in a my own HIPAA sort of way). Where else would I have found out that a friend of mine has a scar where his first wife stabbed him with a kitchen knife? Who knew that someone always thought the arches of her feet were particularly beautiful? So from all this I have the unique and glorious opportunity to make beautiful pictures of these special places on the body with which I’m suddenly entrusted,

One of the many great things about HomeBase is that it provides the chance and support for experimentation. Home/Body Imaging would never have come into being otherwise; it is a very new way for me to make work yet it simultaneously wound up yet another surprising mash up. My long ago study of interior design collided with my photographic interest in interiors (and oddly colored ones at that. The Martha Steward cardiac arrest peach-y hued paint of the clinic walls looked as if it were made from melting all the old recalled Crayolas that had inappropriately been called “flesh.” Actually it reminded me a lot of places I’d stayed in Asia). And those two interests made me revisit images I did in my Perdue Series awhile back (those are on my website: www.abbyrobinson.com). Home/Body Imaging (photos of my project are posted on my FaceBook page) certainly made me feel far more at home in my work and that was definitely a HomeBase gift.

A Wish List for a Shelter

HomeBase is collecting the following items for the Henry Street Settlement Shelter:

nonperishable food
clothing
disposable diapers
wipes
televisions
air purifiers
folding strollers
personal care items
( deodorant, shampoo, combs, brushes, body lotions )
baby clothes
new undergarments and socks
toys
happy pictures or posters for walls
clock radios
watches

Please drop this off at HomeBase IV before closing.
Thanks

Marilyn Walter, Artist, HB team member