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Seven Million Acres / Pride of Place 4/13 - 9/30/2019 The publication, 'Seven Million Acres, Pride of Place', contains all entries and is available to purchase at Street Road, or online, here. It is also available to borrow from Street Road's Little Free Library. Closing reception and publication launch at Street Road 9/28/2019, 1-5p Opening reception at Street Road 5/18/2019, 1-7p Anyone with a connection to this territory was invited to participate, and was asked these prompts: Do you have an object that has pride of place in your home? Maybe a special photograph, a favorite painting, a keepsake, a trophy, or something completely unexpected?
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The areas surrounding Street Road and their constitutive communities (immediately including Eastern Lancaster and Western Chester Counties in Pennsylvania) are often not included in arts and cultural mappings. This project seeks to explore this situation and to consider the situation of arts and culture gaps in geographies, particularly with respect to interstitial areas such as our own.
This exhibition, following on from and expanding our 2016 project 7000 acres: a residents' history of Londonderry Township is by residents of 'our area': it takes in objects important to people in our surrounding communities. What has pride of place for us, as individuals, and collectively, and how can this help us to think about place and our relationships in it? To think through these questions, the project centers Street Road and our location, Cochranville, PA, and takes in a ‘place’ of 7 million acres (a radius of about 59 miles), expanding and our practice of highlighting the complex material culture of 'here'. With this partially arbitrary mapping, major cities in our region fall at the periphery, and we continue to consider the questions: what makes up our region?, any region?, and what is our place in it? Photographs and a description of why the object is significant for its owner, are all included in a 2019 publication, Seven Million Acres / Pride of Place. RELATED EXHIBITION MATERIALS AND PROGRAMMING
Listen to our interview about the Seven Million Acres project with the Artifactual Journey Podcast here and on iTunes.
RECONSIDERING PLACE, Common Field Philly 4/27/2019 Street Road will host this session at the Common Field convening, with participants Fawn Daphne Plessner, Emelie Chhangur - AGYU (Art Gallery York University), and Matthew Fluharty of Art of the Rural. We'll make some trouble for thinking in binary as regards framings like ‘urban’, ‘suburban’, and ‘rural’. This will be recorded and re-played at Street Road later this summer, as part of our programming for Seven Million Acres: Pride of Place. Date and time of screening TBA. General information about Common Field and the Philly convening info here. Reconsidering Place: troubling the urban/rural binary for artist practices and organizations, a Report from the Field The field of art is framed by a normative belief that urban spaces constitute a ‘center’ of cultural endeavors and that rural spaces are at the ‘periphery’. This imaginary is increasingly challenged by concepts that ambiguate conventional understandings of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’, as well as framings such as the 'suburban' or 'exurban'. Such designations do not capture the variegated social and cultural spaces that have become visible in recent decades, comprised as they are of axes of relationships and mobilities amongst multiple places and that also intersect with online spaces. Such designations also serve to reify place through colonial vocabularies and concepts and thereby reinforce not only the racialization and industrialization of space but also leave out important indigenous concepts and relations to place. They also sustain immobilities, even as mobility and access is increasingly assumed. This session draws out speakers’ and attendees’ perspectives to examine working in multiple in-betweens, aiming to raise new questions about the cogency of claims to centrality and marginality. Visit us on Instagram for objects and their stories:
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