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[Editor’s note: It has been The Dreaming Machine’s experience that sometimes a sort of media serendipity, like a magic net, entangles and let’s us drag in vibrant troves of artistic finds that resonate with the spirit of our initiative. We can say that finding Global Art Project (henceforth GAP) through a poster in the Facebook notification environment was one such moment. In this article cobbled together with pieces sent by GAP co-founder Carl Heyward we would like to share the rich trove of materials, both print, graphics, video, and collaborative histories with the journal’s readers].
Here is a composite of what GAP is about:
Originally Carl Heyward (San Francisco, California USA) and Lorna Crane (New South Wales, Australia) began a friendship and correspondence via Heyward’s KNEE(jerk) Fragmentation (mail art ) PROJECT in 2011 which consists of a one-for-one exchange of postcard sized art works made exclusively for the project that has attracted over 500 artist- participants and produced over 3,000 individual art works.
The idea of fragmentation is central to his aesthetic mission in that the pieces of a culture, the debris, the archaeological products of waste and discard give evidence of culturally assigned value and worth; of conscious and sublimated preoccupations of contemporary culture and that their combination through collage, assemblage and other art methods allows a reading of place and time that includes and transcends these elements. Heyward is currently considering museums, galleries and archives to donate part of this collection and is preparing traveling exhibitions.
Heyward and Crane developed a dialog in the course of this project recognizing the resonance of their personal imagery and founded ZIMBABWE(two-step) to encourage their own practice as a collaborative device, each marking a canvas or surface and sending intact or as a fragment to the other shortly after launching KNEE(jerk). In the course of these eclectic endeavors, both artists exhibited in their respective countries and participated in international shows. In expanding their inclusion of other artists in the subsequent projects, Heyward and Crane added painter Joan Stennick of San Francisco; Akiko Suzuki an award winning contemporary quilt maker from Osaka, Japan; the hugely popular self-taught Vered Gersztenkorn (Tel Aviv, Israel) a painter-collagist; and Chaewon Laura Oh of Seoul, Korea a multimedia artist and accomplished portraitist, completing the GLOBAL ART PROJECT in November 2013.
Our work reflects individual, personal and global concerns by virtue of intention. We are creating and exhibiting work that allows the freedom of expression by the very opportunity to communicate beyond language and culture with diverse artists from all over the world while remaining open to the opportunities of the moment accessed through this circumstance in a settings such as Mazatlan Mexico, Marin County, San Francisco and Benicia, California as well as Venice, Lecce and Treviso, Italy, sites of our workshops, demonstrations, workshops and studio environments.We are linked by activity in mixed-media art practice, which may be reduced to working with the materials at hand and has antecedents in collage, assemblage, found-object and related practice.
GAP ( global art project ) a group of international artists working in various media, promoting collaboration, experimentation and mutual development of art practice meet again in Lecce, Italy after exhibitions and workshops in Mazatlan, Mexico at Museo de Arte de Mazatlan, Marin MOCA, The Arsenal in Benicia, Ca. (see https://www.artsillustrated.com/contemporary-african-arts-show-benicia-ca-art/ )
Tonio Jazz Festival, and Ca’ Zanardi (GAP Venice JULY 2014). 2015: two rotating exhibitions at Gallery Cittadino and Fondo Verri augmented by intensive private mixed-media workshops at Monna Lisa studios (September 20-October 4) followed by collaborative studio practice.
This is an international, multicultural, multi-national, pan-ethnic conglomerate. The diverse group of painters, mixed-media artists, textile, photo and collage practitioners share a common interest in what they term FRAGMENTATION: the taking of disparate elements (FRAGS) not ordinarily associated with art practice and combining them with creative passion, inventive ingenuity and above all, a belief in the democratization of the art process from inception to execution to presentation to acquisition.
GAP champions collaborative activity as a vehicle for stimulation and enhanced creative discovery having experienced the rewards of group interaction and the illuminating effect in enhancing personal practice. Having corresponded for a number of years via electronic social media, the nascent GAP members initiated exchanges of shards of paper, fabric, photos… found objects, whatever caught their fancy and built, initially depending upon the vagaries of international postal systems, vibrant surprising collages, paintings and constructions reflecting the international flavor of the gathered, exchanged, rotated and deconstructed elements; the sensibility and selection of the artists, one adding a frag here, another a mark there, in an adding and subtraction, expansion and reduction of aesthetic impulses in exercises that produced works on fabric, paper and canvas in the spirit of FLUXUS, COBRA and EXQUISITE CORPSE, perhaps the spiritual antecedents of GAP activity.
GAP has been invited for additional residencies in Chicago and Mumbai and returned to Italy in September 2015 with workshops and exhibitions at sites including Gallery Cittadino, Association Fondo Verri and
Monna Lisa Studios, curated by Monica Lisi and Mario Catalano. 2016 A GAP exhibition of Collaborative works at Museo de ARte Moderno de Mazatlan, Mazatlan, Mexico and DADA HERE AND NOW for SF International Arts Festival also 2016; March and April 2017 marked exhibitions and workshops in Mazatlan, Mexico at Baupres Gallery. We returned to Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi July 27-August 21, 2016 at Venezia Art House for workshops, an organic exhibition, studio collaboration and residency.
GAP V Mazatlan 2017 @ Baupres Gallery; GAP VI Ghent; GAP VII Senegal winter 2019; CROSSING BORDERS , Ghent, Belgium Sint-Amanduskapel -Campo-Santo August -September 2019
please click on this link for images of the exhibits http://globartproject.wixsite.com/globalartproject-art/crossing-borders?fbclid=IwAR12n24sJvn-Nsquz287IXVI2v5anaKmzm5n3DRpBv_PpujOxDhc-mEmAvs
DISLOCATIONS
Brooklyn Art Museum Artists Books Project; no/ MIND Photographic Exhibit East Village Art View Gallery , NYC Sept 1- Nov 1, 2019; Contemporary African Artists; GENDER GAP : The Women of Global Art Project
Gallerie Renee Marie, Benicia, Ca, FRAGMENTOS Casa de Cultura de San Leandro, Madrid 2020; GAP VIII Residency Sponsored by SOOVAC Mineapolis 2021
