Axle Contemporary
a mobile artspace based in Santa Fe, New Mexico
PROJECTS
September 2016
a travelling photo portrait studio on the Navajo Nation and in surrounding areas.
Potato part of a new arts festival in Taos, THE PASEO
Friday September 26th, 2014 4-10 pm
Axle Contemporary joined twenty contemporary artists for The Paseo, a unique one-night experience on the streets of Taos. The Paseo is a festival dedicated to bringing the art of installation, performance and projection to the streets of Taos, New Mexico.
We provided potatoes, carving tools, some delicious colorful spices, and paper. We hung the prints on the exterior of our mobile gallery, gave a print to take away, and then cut up the potato blocks and added them to our pot of soup. Make a block print and share in the soup.
500 prints made, 200 bowls of soup served, over 1,000 visitors.
August 19 - September 14, 2014
This series explored art and action related to the ecology of economies, art related to money, innovative and creative approaches to economics, and interrelations between the fields of economics and ecology. The series included an exhibition of visual art, roundtable discussions, performances, and installations. We aim to encourage a conversation around the intersections of economics, ecology and art, including critical commentary and new approaches and alternatives to the status quo
The Renga Project One year: 100 artists and poets
The Renga Project began on the summer solstice, 2013. It's a new take on an ancient traditional collaborative form of Japanese poetry. 52 weekly stanzas were written by a diverse group of New Mexico poets. We also invited 52 New Mexico artists to create a linked drawing with each artist responding to a writer's stanza. The poem has been displayed on a large sign in the Santa Fe Railyard all year, with new stanzas added weekly.
More information here.
Purchase the books here
A mobile photo studio on the streets of Albuquerque for one week
Free prints, 600 participants, exhibition at 516 ARTS, and a book.
Paula Castillo, Charlie Carrillo, Erika Wanenmacher, Stacey Neff, August Muth, Thelma Mathias, Michael Schippling, Don Kennell, Charles Greeley & Bunny Tobias, Woody Vasulka, Steina, Cheri Ibes, Kathleen McCloud, Lara Nickel, Gail Rieke, Sondra Goodwin.
Axle Contemporary and Shirley Klinghoffer
In March 2012, the road led us to SITE Santa Fe, where Axle Contemporary was invited to participate in Time-Lapse / MARCH 2012. Our project, E PLURIBUS UNUM, engages our mobile gallery, the SITE Santa Fe gallery, and the web. The interior of the mobile gallery was transformed into a photo studio where Axle Contemporary collaborators, Jerry Wellman and Matthew Chase-Daniel created photographic portraits of over 500 people over the course of 10 days in 11 locations all over the city. Each participant held a small meaningful object in their portrait. 2 copies of each photograph were immediately printed in our mobile printing station. One was distributed free to the participant, the other hung on the walls (interior and exterior) of the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery.
We found a charming old roadside sign in need of a new purpose. Earlier in its life this sign advertised the coldest beer in town and then the hottest chile in the Española valley. But not everything that is cool is in the fridge and not all things hot are edible. We presented 2 new poems (one on each side of the sign) each week for four months during the summer of 2011. Automobile passengers, bike riders, and pedestriansm enjoyed poetry in consistently unexpected places throughout Santa Fe. 2 poems x 16 weeks=32 poems, liberated from the page and set free to infiltrate the consciousness of the people: ¡Que Viva La Poesia!