Swap meet: a cross-cultural lens project

How may art make a difference in people's lives? A primary goal of the Expanded Arts foundation class at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa is to rearticulate the role of the artist in the community. The curriculum, developed by Peter Chamberlain and myself, attempts to foster a broad understanding and awareness of the interdependent relationships among cultural, political, and religous aspects of society.

Because of its success in encouraging students to explore these ideas, as well as its versatility, the Cross-Cultural Lens Project is often the initial assignment in the foundation class. Students choose a partner who seems to have contrasting or complementary characteristics, background, or gender. Over the next few weeks the students' instructors guide them through a series of stages. In the first stage, the students exchange information and collect abundant research about their respective backgrounds through photographs, books, interviews, sketches, and found objects. As the partners record, document, and respond to the differences between their identities, their explorations reveal commonalities as well. Using paper, art supplies, and ordinary household materials, they distill the research they collect into numerous sheets of visual and textual data that may be further manipulated, combined, fragmented, exaggerated, rescaled, superimposed, or juxtaposed in a playful, nonjudgmental process of exploration. Each experiment opens additional avenues of investigation and generates countless possibilities that are fresh and surprising to the artists.

The information will not make sense until the next stage of the project, when the students establish relationships and patterns between selected notations and materials. As they sift, cull, and organize the information they have collected, they clarify their ideas. Up to this point we have reminded the students not to speculate on the ultimate presentation of their work. Only in the final stages of the project, when the information is shaped into a material presentation, do we reveal to the students the general category in which their project will be presented. This category differs each semester; it is typically an object from daily life and may range from kites to books, lunch boxes, or clothing. Because the project takes an open-ended approach to media, the students must decide which materials, techniques, and formal elements will most powerfully impart their concept. They may elect to incorporate time-based and/or kinesthetic components. Visual and material considerations develop in tandem with critical strategies in a mutally dependent praxis.

In one semester the medium was bodywear, which permitted students to investigate the concept of donned or shed layers of identity. Culminating in a fashion show staged in the Art Building's bamboo courtyard, partners strolled together wearing the clothing made for them as their counterparts introduced them through the artwork. A video of the fashion show, along with the bodywear, was then installed in a gallery designed to resemble a flea market. This exhibition was dubbed the Swap Meet.

Through this project, students began to gain an understanding of their own identities in a cross-cultural context. For example, a male student of Hawaiian ancestry made a concrete and wire hat for his female partner from Ireland to indicate that she bears the weight of violent conflict in her homeland (similar to Hawaiian struggles); the flower signals hope. The Hawaiian student has an Irish surname but knew nothing of this aspect of his heritage, so his partner made him a plaid Irish ceremonial kilt/Hawaiian malo (loincloth) of woven and layered palm husks, sepia-toned photographs, scrim, and threads. Their art had spun a filament connecting two voices, traversing two cultures.

By carefully refining the process of investigation, by adapting appropriate media and techniques to content, and by transmuting the informative into the experiential, the Cross-Cultural Lens Project generates energy and emotion. From this fertile mulch springs new levels of understanding and action - a creative recycling of meaningful discourse for artist and participant alike.

Patricia Wood teaches expanded arts, video/electronic media, and theory and criticism at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Her intermedia artwork is community based and historically informed.

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