HARRELL FLETCHER | LECTURE HIKE
Participatory walking tour
Sunday, August 16, 2009, 1 PM starting at the ODD Gallery
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
During his time in Dawson, Portland-based artist Harrell Fletcher will be undertaking a participatory community-based art action.
For this project, Fletcher will be facilitating a walking tour around the Dawson City limits with a group of participants who will, at some point during the hike, be invited to stop and give a lecture to the rest of the group on some area of personal knowledge. The lectures would happen at a point in the hike that relates to the lecture topic. Talk topics could range from local history to botanical and other scientific information, and could include a variety of presentation forms from a standard talk to musical or performative approaches. All of the hike participants will also be encouraged to document the hike in some way including written notes, digital photographs, sketches, videos etc. Documentation of this action will then be compiled and presented as a key element of this project. This documentation will give a tangible venue for acknowledgement and dissemination for all the participant’s roles within the project. In the context of The Natural & The Manufactured, Fletcher’s project will highlight both the constructed and natural features of the local landscape through a strategy of informal conversation and direct action with the environment.
PARTICIPANTS
The two-hour Lecture Hike involved 35 participants with 15 giving presentations about some personal area of knowledge or experience, related or in response to the Dawson landscape. Presenters included Pasha Malla on stolen bikes, Lance Blomgren on back alleys, Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling on four-leaf clovers, Caili Steel on landlords and Dawson housing, Clair Forsyth on photography, Dr. Jeanne Randolph on gold and poetry, Nicole Bauberger on her painting career, Lulu Keating on insane friends and deadly hikes, a DC Mud-Bog worker on the annual Mud-Bog Truck races, Jen Laliberte on local history and secret places, Chris Clarke on the 9th Avenue Trail, David Curtis on fishing in Dawson, and eating fish in Dawson, and Owen Williams on changing Dawson architecture.
BIOGRAPHY
HARRELL FLETCHER has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years.
His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in the San Francisco area; The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Sculpture Center, in New York City; DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas; PICA in Portland, OR; CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA; Signal in Malmo, Sweden; Domain de Kerguehennec in France; and The Royal College of Art in London.
In 2004 Fletcher was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMoMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France.
In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory website with Miranda July. A book version LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel. In 2005, Flectcher won the Alpert Award in Visual Arts.
His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations.
Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.