Weird Alms
Weird Alms is a project organized for a small group of students and participating contemporary artists within both the larger Los Angeles area and the community of CSUB as a means to open space to think about our relationship to objects as psychological and metaphysical access points during a pandemic time where our sense of space and practice of life collapsed the work environment, home environment, educational environment, and studio environment into the same space as we faced the glowing rectangles of distanced learning, work, and studio visits in order to socialize, connect, and maintain a sense of community. Each student received one permanently gifted contemporary artwork from a participating artist as a grounding point for a 10 week workshop series on behavior, performativity, the social constructs of “weirdness”, and the synthesis of personal, object-oriented cosmologies as a means to expand our tool sets for embodied storytelling. Because the participating artists permanently gifted the objects, the piece will continue to unfold for as long as the recipients continue to make meaning with, about, or even relate to the weird alms they received. As the project unfolded within the course of the semester, relational documents were gathered for the purpose of some kind of exhibition at some point, however, documents will continue to be collected if they are sent even beyond the scope of our time together during the residency, pushing the boundaries of when and how an artwork becomes a pedagogical object, a part of a personal ambiance, or the symbolic placement of objects as an extension of the self that we curate into our living spaces to reciprocally express and mirror back to ourselves who we are.
Participating artists who gave a gift to the project include:
Jedediah Caesar, Stephanie Mei-Huang, Sam K. Shoemaker, Molly Shea, Paul Salveson, Amia Yokoyama, Tucker Rae Grant, Dallas Small, Kelly Wall, Jenny Eom, Tyler Caulkin, and Me
