Untitled (Inside); Untitled (Outside)

Untitled (Inside); Untitled (Outside) was an assemblage of mobiles constructed from collages created as part of a collaboration with 13 teenagers from Chelsea’s Clinton Middle School.

Davis initiated the process by asking the students to take photographs of their living spaces, focusing on what they saw when looking out from those spaces. He then had them select one image from these many views and make contour drawings of several objects in that photograph.

All the drawings were converted into adhesive vinyl facsimiles. Students were asked to select one to keep and then each young artist made a collage of the 13 other vinyl drawings onto his or her own. “In the end, instead of each creating something solely from their own memory, and aesthetic, the students ended up with something involving a part of each, taking their personal effects and memories into a larger conversation with each other’s,” Jay Davis recalls.

Context

This project was produced as part of Art Creates Communities: Project in Chelsea, one of More Art’s founding programs. Artists showing in the Chelsea galleries were connected via More Art to the local community, encouraging a dialogue, and seeking to create a strong link with the young people who live in the neighborhood and attend the local public schools. The goal of Art Creates Communities was for everybody to partake of the creative energy galvanizing the Chelsea neighborhood. The strategy was to show the younger generation how to tap its own budding creativity and convey the message that in life they should never be passive spectators but actively grasp challenges and changes.

Artists were invited to collaborate with teenagers from the Clinton Middle School for Writers and Artists (MS260), engaging them in the different media of modern artistic expression, including photography, video, painting, and performance art. The final projects were important works in their own right.

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