Does your house need to be painted?
Do you enjoy negotiating the price?
Do you care who paints it?
Depending on how you answer these questions, you may be an ideal candidate for Felipe Castelblanco‘s We Paint Houses project. Taking advantage of PRACTICE Gallery’s open space, the artist has turned the gallery into a temporary office – paint swabs, clipboards and laptops becoming signifiers of a business operation. Visitors are invited to set up appointments with a clerk, consult design books, choose a color, name a price.
Following the negotiation process, Castelblanco and Latino day laborers will paint the chosen houses. Throughout the month of June, thorough documentation will take place and the resulting photographs, conversation and interactions will be collected into a July exhibition back at PRACTICE.
Where the project will end up is still uncertain, but the possibilities are invigorating.
Let’s hope the artist does not hesitate in the slightest.
We Paint Houses will be on view through Saturday, July 26th. For more information about the project visit: http://www.practicegallery.org/
See the ad here: http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/hss/4503979526.html
About the artist:
Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of socially engaged and new media art. Through urban interventions, video, performance, sculpture and networked installations, his work creates participatory experiences of publicness and enables coexistent encounters between unlikely audiences and across vast distances. Felipe attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012 and holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been shown internationally, including the San Diego Museum of Art; FAD festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; FIVAC festival in Camaguey Cuba; the Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh; the Valenzuela Klenner Gallery in Bogotá Colombia, and in storefronts and street corners throughout United States. Felipe is currently the John Fergus Post MFA Fellow at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where he also directs Mote Gallery, an experimental space focused on showcasing the work of emerging international artists. Felipe’s work can be seen at: www.felipecastelblanco.com
