All the papers are spread out before me.  The selection of class curriculum for a fall teaching quarter @ SEED ARTS.  I dive into the application.  Who are you targeting, and how do you propose to make a difference in the lives of these twelve students?  I read the catalog again and am hooked on a ledge of disappointment.  “…resident youth between the ages of approximately five to twelve years old.”  I’ve designed my entire proposal for a high school student.  What does a fourth grader know about space?

Three days a week I teach nine year olds how to play piano, which, when I break it all down means being the go between between parents, teachers, the playground, homework and whatever else is buzzing around in their adolescent brains.  It’s an ebb and flow of space, a cavity that hurts and heals when my students slowly come to terms with their strength in learning.  That awful thing called practice, I tell them, leaving them to their own devices, the worst sort of space.  Two hands and a piano.  All teachers set aside, I leave them to their own judgment.  What do you think is the hardest part of this piece?

I look down at the piece of paper on my table and ignore the numbers “5-12″.  I drink my latte.  I put my trust in a fourth grader.  I open my mind to the idea that any imagination is broad enough to tell a story, to delve into memory, into experience.  I brainstorm the following:

• Think about a space you go to every day. This can be a school, house, room, planet …
• How did you first meet this space?  I first met ________ while doing _________ .
• What does the space look like?
• Write a letter to the space
• If the space could talk, what would it say?
• What is a memoir? What is architecture?

I’ve lived in Seattle for five years, and each fall I fall in love once again with the cool breeze and prolonged summer season that insists on one more week into October.  One more inch of sun is all we need to get our minds ready for one more winter.  Come January, I take a trip to Montana where I am surrounded by the freshest vistas I know.  Apart from my time in Alaska, this is the place I come to first for solace.  I hunker down in my mother’s office watching snow fall off the trees without a single quake of wind.  Maybe it’s a passing doe or the imaginary silence that causes my mind to stir up the words on the page.  I chunk through snow and ice and learn and re-learn how to play.  I talk to our horses, lapsing my arms over their manes, resting the weight of my forehead against their brow until our eyes are one.

And in the midst of each visit home, I offer myself a promise that I will have that space to myself.  I write the promise on a sheet of paper folded and tucked in the space-nobody-knows-about.  I try to remember. I take a picture of all the places I’ve been to and hide them in a box in the basement.  The only one that matters is the one I can remember.  The one I wake up to.  I shake my forehead and fall back on the pillow.  I’ve spent the night in too many cities to take any more photographs.

Coming back into my house I ask myself if this is the space I’ve longed for.  Where do I go from here?  I wake up.  It’s five thirty, August.  I stretch myself over the water of Seward Park.  It is my first run in a year.  I am a fraud.  If I were a real artist I’d build a greenhouse on wheels.  I would wear running shorts.  How many loops do I make before the space I want becomes my own?

I especially love the new and improved MICRO Grant.  It’s everywhere.  It feeds on my pocket.  It says, eat me.  Eat me now.  Make me bigger.  Make my neighborhood, restaurant, apartment, mural, and everything else that doesn’t need a once in a life time but twenty times applied for macarthur foundation back drop … it just says, I’m enough.  A small microcosm of proof that your space can feed off itself one day at a time.

Here in Detroit, I see small reflections of the spaces I’ve left behind in Seattle.  I email Summer that there are so many things she has GOT to look at.  “If only you were here with me,” I say.  We could hit up all the independent anarchist small press bookstores or just start one of our own. Because there have got to be some of those too.  In a space so empty, there is room for just about everything.

At the Lager House on Michigan Avenue.  PJ lights up on the subject of space. We talk about real estate, about the price of a quality home.  He describes how long a man holds on to his lot and overcoming the resistance to sell.  People hold out for the highest bidder.  Hold out for generations.  And still there is no sale.  I am looking at a website on how to purchase one inch of real estate in Detroit, not too long of a walk from this bar stoop and my vanilla porter and PJ’s enthusiastic declarations of a city he loves.  Loveland, owned and founded by Mary and Jerry, provides Micro real estate ventures – one inch for one dollar – here in detroit for anyone.  That’s right.  I too can be a part of the space.

What is so attractive about the Micro scale?  The residency, the land.  Providing opportunity to identify with ourselves and our work in spaces we hold dear or do not know at all … with just a few words of advice.  Is it the idea that I am a part of something and that something, no matter how small, is progress toward change?

In other news, we are performing tonight. Follow our live feed of locations on Facebook and Tweeter.  As it so happens, Lager House is most definitely a hub on the map for projection art.  So we’ll see you here or online … 10pm … rock!

Sunday. 2pm. I sit in the one sports bar across from the sports stadium, which might be the most crowded scene I’ve yet to see.  I am the only customer in the bar for at least an hour.  The bartender is kind and kinder still when I pronounce my intention to make art in his city.  His city, that he has lived here for ten years.  “Too long,” he says.  A common thread.  The day is filled with touring neighborhoods, scanning lots and rows of houses screaming abandonment and arsony, others might be cut and pasted from a garden magazine.

Moving closer to downtown makes the loneliness of a place more visible.  And yet, with each factory and broken window, there is an underlying current of creativity.  This could be, this wants to shed light on that.  What if.  How long would it take.  The artist in me makes mental notes of size and height of each factory, churning numbers in my mind for loft space and funding.  What if.

“It’s a dying city,” Erin repeats.  It’s true, and it’s not.  It’s transitional.  Its innards are ripped, and being re-sewn.  I change bars.  I’m typing from a small but aging jazz bar, the mahogany wood matches the dark lighting and candlelit tables that shelter your identity over the course of the afternoon.  Soft service, soft music.  I enjoy a beet salad.  I contemplate a full service bar from the dreadlock bartender.  I write.  Not everything has died.  I watch a band of hipsters set up the stage.  We nod.  Art exists.

In preparation for tonight’s show, here are a few sketch writings I’ve been working on.  I like to think the space is speaking, and discussing it’s own experience or memoirs.

1. Building Blocks

I arrived here and nobody noticed a thing.  No one.  Not even my mother.  I was alone.  It was a sacrifice to turn out this way.  And the entire shipyard watched as I built this place brick by brick by brick.  You think I’m joking.  But I’m not.  I don’t joke.  This, this here?  No joke.  I take my work very seriously.  When a girl has to move herself over and over again, things start to turn out for the worse and all you can do is try to hold on.  It’s like your mother would say and I hope you mother says it because otherwise you have a lot of issues with you mother but a good mother would say that you have to put your feet in the ground and don’t budge for no one.  You’re a tree.  And all the little trees around you are gonna grow up.  But you’re the first one.  And whether or not you like it you have to remember that you are the root.  My mother never left the city.  She lives down the street and everybody makes fun of her because she never says nothing bad about nobody.  So everybody laughs.

2. Bones

I remember exactly who set the bones down.  It was Jake, this man off his way from Colombus.  He talked.  He talked with his hands.  Hands so big I thought they’d get stuck in the gutter.  Hands he kept printing over my bones.  I’ve got bones and nobody but Jake sees them.  Bones, he says, you are going to last for decades.  And I did.  Here I am.  Feel them.  I’m no fake.  I’ve seen it.  Seen Jake die.  Died right here.  Came here coughing, I said Jake, lie down.  Hard as dirt he was.  Die a peaceful man.  And the woman.  She comes wailing in on the morning can’t mind her own mind.  She did.  Hit me hard.  Scratched us both upright and ran a steel grate into the bones.  Alright, I said.  I decide who dies.

Patriotic Basketball with No Trespassing Sign

Arriving in the city with an ETA of 9:30 with half an overhead projector.  Spak Pizza overflowed with an audience ripe for performance.  The space itself, a large, abandoned wall dead center across the street from Spak.  Two young pine trees planted – designed – along the sidewalk.  Apart from the cars lined in front it wasn’t too bad.  There was free parking but nobody considered the height of a projector.  Do I hold it?  Back to the half a projector missing from the case.  A blessing in disguise. After a group huddle, grunt, groan, table of pints … I settled on the notion that not all spaces want to be spoken for.  This is what dress rehearsals are for.

I tell Ryan he underestimates how flexible an artist I am.  He fidgets with his blackberry.  I underestimate how determined an artist he is.  He finds a new projector in Toledo.  He is a GOD.  After a night of sleep and a restful morning in Pittsburgh we are back on the road to Detroit.

I consider, and consider again, the reality that this is a project about space.  About the immediacy of space, about deterioration, about privacy and the public.  About regeneration, and the variety of relationships we develop with and around space.  As artists, the project also reflects the choice to work in the now.  Without permits or permission.  By the time I arrive in Pittsburgh, I am feeling the impact of this decision, in planning and purpose.  Working with friends and collaborators and the struggle to compromise style and modality while working within the constraints of immediate planning.  When I think about the time line of this project, I am relieved to think of the benefits of space and its longevity.

Questions: How to write the character of a space, rather than the deterioration of a place that no longer exists?

I close my eyes and take in the humidity of the Pittsburgh air.  It is strikingly familiar.  I never believed the smell of home would stick in my mind.  These are the small things that I leave behind.  Ryan pulls up outside a building recently abandoned in a neighborhood newly gentrified.  I think it must be occupied with a small light in the lower window.  His friend Eric suggests a local pizza joint.  We take a drive and find that the manager is pretty relaxed about loaning power for the show.  I check out the manager, who looks either high or overworked or both.  I brush it aside, nod to Ryan, and settle on the wall across the street.  Extension cords, check.  Power, check.  Parking, check.

Wagon Wheel outside Morgantown, WV

Back in Morgantown, about an hour away.  Ryan and I joke about politics, being a republican – but not – and jam out to Betty Davis.  Thursday morning, I wake up ready to get down with the grit and the next two days are spent doing just that.  Websites up.  Photos logged.  Scouting sites.  What questions can I ask these spaces, and how will they respond?