1,095: One Year's Worth of Other People's Plates
For the last ten years my work and practice have engaged with the architectural and design history of Los Angeles as well as the effect of consumerism on urban landscapes. In 2010, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I debuted a sculptural performance called 1,095: One Year's Worth of Other People's Plates as a featured artist in a program called "Let Them Eat LACMA", curated by the collective Fallen Fruit.
Today, I'm working toward invoking the ephemeral form of 1,095 again at the inaugural Bristol Biennial in Bristol, England on June 2, 2012. 1,095 as a whole is a composite of process, performance and sculpture. Each stage of the work engages with delineated space and time, both of which shrink with each successive stage, ending with the dismantling of the work itself.
For the inception of 1,095 at LACMA I took two months to collect plates from the greater Los Angeles area, documenting the process and the people involved. Then, over the course of 4 hours, I constructed a sculptural mandala, formed of stupas made from the donated plates, in the lobby of one of LACMA's buildings. This performance culminated in the presentation of the finished sculpture, which stood for only about 15 minutes before being dismantled by the people who donated the plates, now invited to swap their donations for new plates.
This new staging of 1,095 will emerge from the largely Afro-Carribean population of the St. Pauls neighborhood in Bristol, England. With donated plates coming from a smaller and more culturally specific area than Los Angeles, I have decided to expand the performance aspect of 1,095 to include the presentation of oral histories by several select residents from St. Pauls. While I build the mandala, they will convey some of the history of the area to onlookers, more specifically connecting history and identity to the plates on display.
To achieve the international debut of 1,095, I have several expenses to cover, the greatest being round trip airfare to Bristol.
With the funds raised, a week prior to the Biennial I will conduct four collaborative workshops with local St Pauls residents, inviting them to engage in dialogue about their home, their history and their modes of storytelling. These participants will be paid an honorarium to develop and perform personal monologues during the building of the mandala.
These funds will also allow me to record these oral histories which will be made available on a new project website featuring audio, video and photographs of collected plates from both the Bristol Biennial and LACMA.
A complementary book will be produced featuring photographs of select plates, providing a view of the design history of everyday people from both of these cities.
The funds raised will provide an opportunity to continue my commitment to long-term collaborative projects and to expand internationally for the first time. I'm drawn to the community support of USA Projects for the opportunity it provides to be acknowledged by the very community in which I’m so invested.
My most sincere thanks for your donation.
Bari Ziperstein
