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Dan Hurlin
Jan. 27 — Feb. 1, 2009

Disfarmer / St. Ann's Warehouse
Brooklyn, NY
The spaceship from (the efflorescence of) Walter at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. Photo by Claire Tancons. (the efflorescence of) Walter at The Kitchen, New York City. Photo by Rashida Bumbray. Walter Carter in spacesuit. Photo by Ralph Lemon. Ralph Lemon in Geography Trilogy Part 3: Come home Charley Patton. Photo by Dan Merlo. Image from (the effloreescence of) Walter. Photo by Ralph Lemon.

Cross Performance/Ralph Lemon

The Memory Project is a two-week workshop that stimulates young people to explore their homes, families, and local myths and stories as materials for their own works of art. Exercises in listening, annotation, journal-writing, photography and collage-making help participants become more aware of their own histories, and thereby understand more about their present lives. The workshop grew out of Ralph Lemon's research in Mississippi as he developed Come home Charley Patton (2000-2004). During this time, Lemon met Clementine Davis at the Oakes African American Cultural Center in Yazoo City and Jimmy Holmes at the Blue Front Café in Bentonia. Both spoke of the need for young black Mississippians to learn more about their history and culture-not from lectures or books but experientially-and both perceived the potential educational value in Lemon's research method. After successfully piloting the workshops in Yazoo City, Cross Performance has offered them in New York City, Minneapolis, and Chicago and Urbana, IL.

Practice of Form is a multi-day research lab that investigates how a daily personal practice and creative process inform an outcome and form; and how, through an open and guided discussion, the nature of form holds infinite possibilities of meaning. The questions of the group become the workshop methodology, as inquiry creates practice and practice facilitates a refinement of the questions. Participants may grapple with questions such as: "How does the creative practice in general, and humanity in particular, come to embody the memory of historical events or processes, thus acting as a meditative interface between memory and history?" The work begins with the body and a practical study of the body as cultural language, as place, as memory, as a virtual and digital image, and as architecture.