In April of 2012, Lise Patt, director of the ICI traveled to one of the organization’s outposts in Berkeley, CA; a site managed by Christel Dillbohner.  For one week they workshopped an idea for a series of interchanges that will bring artists and art writers together to tackle some of the most difficult subject matter in art. Sometimes a body of work seems impenetrable; the writer tasked with writing about the art is unable to find a way in without imposing an artificial construct that reflects more about their own process than that of the artist’s. For one week, Dillbohner and Patt worked through the early stages of an imagined workshop, spurred on by Dillbohner’s recent group of paintings, fields of white inspired by the icy terrain of the earth’s two poles. Over the course of a a few days, they ‘traveled’ from Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, to Smithson’s “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” from the Reindeer people of Mongolia to the doomed polar trip of S. A. Andrée.

They called the week’s work Fingerübangen – finger exercises – to put name to their activities of pointing, photographing but mostly looking with the finger held up to the lips to ensure silence.

The workshop will be continued in June of 2012 in the land of the midnight sun – Norway and Sweden.

Collective Camouflage: The Non-Profit as a Subversive Artist’s Medium.

Lecture given at San Francisco Art Institute, March 2011.

An impromptu shrine at Chimayo, New Mexico. The crosses are made out of chewing gum. The newest additions sport names and teeth marks but over time the discards merge into the crevices of the rock offering a crude lesson about man’s overdeveloped sense of importance and of nature’s quiet retort.