Elsewhere Artist Conversation Series: Brian Hitselberger

I hope you'll be able to join me tomorrow night for my Artist Conversation at Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina. During my residency at Elsewhere, I re-curated what was formerly the "wood room" on the second floor of the 24-hour studio. I cleared a space on the incredibly messy and dusty third floor, installed two sets of industrial shelves, and built a wood management system. Hopefully, future artists and residents will use this system for as a safer and more organized system of access to the raw materials that Elsewhere has to offer. The long-term plan for Elsewhere is to convert the third floor into a "more traditional" artist workshop. This was the first step in that direction. Once the room was emptied of wood, I thoroughly cleaned the walls and floor, and applied polyurethane to all surfaces -- it was sparkly and clean. I then began creating a room-sized installation, referencing the coexistence of poetry and chaos within Elsewhere's space. At once Utopic and terrifying, Elsewhere serves as a completely self-sustaining museum, in which no materials leave the premises, and only selected elements are brought into the space. To create work here is an exercise in reuse, re-contextualization, and reinvention. However, because of this process, the physical environment itself is constantly changing--nothing stays in one place for long. The net result upon visitors is a quickly shifting world within a decaying space, a sensation at once exhilarating and ominous; in this maner, Elsewhere functions as a scale model of our reality, where real-life sordid politics, uncomfortable inter-personal relationships, and fragile international relations are played out in metaphor with old objects, cracking paint, falling ceilings and urban detritus. Within this space, I wanted to create a place-holder illuminating this union of discord and order. My piece, 'Goodbye to All That,' attempts to straddle a sense of poetic beauty and silence, while significantly altering the physical space, and manifesting an environment of an ominous an consuming unknown. In this manner, the piece is a model of Elsewhere, which is a model of our reality. It is a model of a model. My Conversation will attempt to re-create for an audience the experience of working and living daily, for 30 days, in this place. The nuances of Elsewhere, as well as it's extremities (reflective silence and deafening visual noise) will be equally straddled through a serial narrative projection comprised of photographs, videos, and sound, accompanied by short texts authored by the artist illuminating the materials from an individual perspective. However, these texts will not be read by the author; rather, audience members, both willing and unwilling, will narrate the experience in real time, in a sense allowing others to occupy the role I have filled for the past month. 'Goodbye to All That' will begin at 8pm in the Elsewhere, at 608 S. Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, and should last about an hour. Admission is free. Expect surprises. I hope you can make it.