photos courtesy of Joe Riley, Camile Messerly, Audrey Snyder
Imagine a train crossing a bridge and a ship sailing over the horizon.
Imagine a ship crossing a bridge and a train over the horizon.
This is Rail/Sail, a journey which deploys the imagery of wind, sea, and sail within the context of a post-industrial landscape of Kansas City. A wind-powered railroad vehicle will connect urban and rural concourses, guided by chance and desire rather than reason or economy. This is a strategy of reclaiming — as prairie might overtake a fallow field — which undermines the efficiencies of commodity production and transportation. The project is a way to imagine transportation and cultivation over longer, slower periods of time, upholding the bright spots of the mind’s eye over the blind spots of the market. Ours is a quixotic vision of transportation and trade where the practical and the absurd may intermingle to produce new visions and knowledge.
Rail/Sail is the emergent project of Joe Riley, Audrey Snyder, and Ricki Dwyer. In the month of August, these collaborators took up residence in Front/Space, conducting weeks of research, building, and programming focused on railroads,journeying, and agricultural sites of learning and re-imagination.
photos courtesy of Joe Riley, Camile Messerly, Audrey Snyder
Rail Sail involved several gatherings, events, and melding of visitors and friends. This "confluence" began with a gathering at Front Space on Friday, August 5, followed by a series of dinners, expeditions, and pop-up shows. Visit the artist's website to read more.
About the crew:
Ricki Dwyer is an artist and educator based in San Francisco. They swing between social practice and craft, producing objects as a record of events. In 2011 they received their BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Since then they've been selected as artist in residence for the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, The White Page gallery in Minneapolis, and Jupiter Woods gallery in London. Currently, Ricki is on tour with their sewing machine, performing an embroidery project to disperse people’s tattoos as patches for other people’s worn clothes. www.ricki.website
Joe Riley is an artist and Master of Yachts 200-ton Offshore Limited Mate. He has sailed aboard 112' schooner Argo, biked atop abandoned railroads in the U.S., paraded a mobile radio network in Ukraine, and helped organize the longest student-led occupation in United States history while studying at Cooper Union. In 2013 he was faculty at Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a resident at Izolyatsia (Kyiv, Ukraine) in 2014, and teaches letterpress printing and metalworking at Cooper Union. He is a collaborator with the artist collective Futurefarmers and a participant in the 2016-17 Whitney Independent Study Program.
http://www.pleasedontfront.com @pleasedontfront
Audrey Snyder is an artist, chef and serial collaborator. Her work investigates the intersection of food systems and cultural production, where examination of simple practice cultivates complex thinking. She has toured the United States by bicycle on and off railroad tracks, was a chef aboard Station to Station train journey, a resident artist on the remote Rabbit Island, and is the creator of Waterline Ceramics. Audrey hails from San Francisco, California and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Audrey Snyder & Joe Riley are collaborators with one another and the artist collective Futurefarmers. Their art combines the poetic, political, and practical as a point of entry to explore urban and rural histories. The work is site-specific and collaborative in nature — emphasizing anti-disciplinary rather than cross/inter-disciplinary practice. Their project Parallel Cases enters the landscape of abandonment and ecological/industrial upheaval in the Northwest United States through the position of the “tramp printer” as a way to understand the symptoms of globalized industry and shifts in land-use. Their current work with Futurefarmers, Seed Journey, is a seafaring voyage tracing the long journey grain has taken—through space, phylogeny, and the hands of time.
Bill Daniel
Texas-born, San Francisco exiled, and confirmed tramp, Bill Daniel continues to experiment with survivalism and bricolage in his attempts to record and report on the various social margins he finds himself in. Currently based on the Texas gulf coast, Daniel divides his time between Texas and touring.
Daniel's work has received awards from Creative Capital, Film Arts Foundation, The Pioneer Fund, Texas Filmmaker Production Fund, the R & B Feder Charitable Foundation, and The Western States Media Alliance. He was a Wattis Foundation artist-in-residence at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where his installation "Souls Harbor" was exhibited in Dec. In 1999 he was in-residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts where he produced several multi-projection 16mm film installations, including "Trespassing Sign" in collaboration with the late Margaret Kilgallen. In 2001 his hobo campfire installation "The Girl on the Train in the Moon" was included in "Widely Unknown" at Deitch Projects in New York. A veteran of the touring circuit, Daniel has programmed, booked and exhibited several mobile art shows. In 1997-98 he curated a weekly screening series, Funhouse Cinema, in Austin, that also weekly screened in Houston and San Antonio. Daniel is also recognized for his work as cinematographer and editor for filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Other endeavors include zines--contributing photography to The Western Roundup, a punk fanzine in 1981-82 designed by Michael Nott, and publishing/editing Detour, a situationist journal, in 1986. He is also the creator of an experimental sports league, The Texas Gas-Powered Leaf Blower Hockey Association.
Shlomit Strutti is an artist from Tel Aviv presently exploring the US. Her primary field is photography, in the broadest sense of the term, and is most interested in the places where photography meets drawing and sculpture. Her work strives to reside in the limits of the photographic technology, attempting to document what can't be seen. Leaning on the lineage of “straight” photography allows her research form and abstraction while capitalizing on photography’s chemical claim to truth. Shlomit graduated with honors from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and spent a semester at the Cooper Union in New York. Since then she's been travelling and working as a freelance wood and mural restorer.
