Matthew Batty, Trapping the In Between, 2015Resurrection is hard, but a century-old former power plant has been brought back to life, and all it took was an 11-artist residency last summer. Organized by the Birdsell Project, a passion project from South Bend, Indiana artists Myles Robertson and Nalani Stolz, a series of sculptures, installations, and experiences sprouted in the basement of the city's aging Commerce Center. Filmmaker Chuck Fry, who documented Robertson and Stolz's first foray into art-fueled architectural regeneration in 2014, and whose film about glass artist Kiva Ford enthralled us in January, returns with an in-depth look at the life and artwork fostered by the Birdsell Project's first-ever summer residency.
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"The Commerce Center basement, with it's varied history as a health facility and a hydroelectric power plant, really provides an interesting canvas for artists to work with," Robertson tells Fry in the new documentary. "The basement can't really be leased in any sort of conventional way, but it was perfect for what we were looking for," adds Stolz. This is reminiscent of New York's Spring/Break Art Fair occupying the empty hallways of Moynihan Station, Red Bull's residency in Detroit, and other efforts to repurpose unused spaces with art.. They welcomed artists from all over the country to live in the derelict space for two months, creating works that react to the neglected walls and dirt-encrusted floors.
Chicago artist Hunter Foster, for example, planted a rose garden in an empty Jacuzzi, once part of the the swanky East Bank Club's men's locker room. "I have been using objects and quiet edits to the architecture in attempts to draw out affects of desire and shame in a strictly gendered space," he writes in the description of Everything Is Nice. Boston-based artist Leah Gallant's Zano with Vains also adapts her work to the space, specifically a weathered sign she found for a construction company called Vannoni & Sons. Gallant spoke to the Vannoni family and encased artifacts from their home in ice, which slowly melts into a series of aqueducts she built, "thus channeling the essence of the Vannonis and returning it into the space." Stolz's artwork, Shrouded, is a series of hanging veils that cover the space, distorting the light and, as she writes, "transforming the caverns into flat pictures of what was. A world that is visible, but just out of our reach."
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These are just a few of the installations that comprise The Birdsell Summer Residency. Each one is a thoughtful take on the history and physical space of South Bend, with materials lists that read like random word generators, encompassing everything from cheesecloth to "screen-prints of skinned groundhog." The residency is Robertson and Stolz's first attempt at giving the artists a place to live and work alongside the installation space.
Bryce Robinson, The Hive Within, 2015The hope is that projects like these will grow the arts and creativity culture of South Bend. "Art I feel is a very strong tool for changing my mind about thing and letting me see things more clearly," Robertson tells Fry in the documentary. "I wanted to bring something like that to the community I live in. Instead of going elsewhere for that, let's build that here."
, 2015This summer, the Commerce Center will host a new artist residency. As with the work created in Birdsell Mansion for the original project, the majority of the artwork has been removed, some of which is able to be displayed elsewhere. "Much of the work was created specifically for the mansion—responding to the space in some way—and thus was never intended to live outside the mansion," Robertson tells The Creators Project. "Some of the work that used the space itself as part of the piece—those pieces that applied material directly to the walls, for example—continue to live at the mansion and have become part of the narrative that other artists have since responded to. Similarly, this is what has become of the work at the Commerce Center. This summer a new group of artists will work in the space, creating new work that continues to respond to the space and the remnants of what work was there in the past, art or otherwise."
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