When suggesting that, perhaps Refuge is a call to political action, I was told quite the contrary. The show is not about raising awareness. “People are already aware” Imminent Disaster and Armsrock tell me.

Nor would they dream of being so bold as to offer solutions “as an urban designer or policymaker might”.


So, as the artists survey the multi-faceted meaning of refuge, I attempt to get to the bottom of their explorations in a special interview with both Imminent Disaster and Armsrock. Gear up for some enlightenment.—Elise Hennigan

Elise Hennigan: What is the inspiration for the collection of works in Refuge?

Imminent Disaster and Armsrock: Our starting point was the idea of refuge in both its concrete and abstract forms. We are addressing contemporary political conditions by working through them in way that’s not directly representational, but more of an allegorical abstraction of these real conditions.

If we were working with documentary photography, for example, we would be directly revealing situations that are of reality, thus indirectly phrasing an answer to the question asked through the images shown. The mediums we are working with lend themselves to an abstracted depiction just by nature of them being a translation of the real world into an aestheticized form. Drawing will always be an abstraction of the objects represented, and therefore presents a different relationship with its subjects than a direct documentation would.
The inspiration for these works was born from a wish to relate to human conditions, and to do this we must look at these conditions from as many angles as possible. In the motions of abstraction undertaken in the creation of these works, we have both gone through a learning process, going in circles outwards from the term chosen as the center of this series of works.


What do you mean by the concept “liminal space”?

Armsrock: Liminality means a threshold, it is a space of transition, a condition I associate very much with the term refuge, with its inherited fragility. Liminality is mostly associated with circumstances of a temporary nature, the motion between two points, but refuge in its abstract form is in my eyes a permanent liminal space. Neither here nor there, directly in between cause and effect.

How do you interpret this idea in your work for Refuge?

Disaster: My work deals with the theme in a much more abstracted way. I think I am inclined to look at a general humanness, and that comes through in the lack of specificity of the figures in my pieces. They are not tied to a particular space or culture, and in many cases are completely disrobed, or draped in a nonspecific way.

Armsrock: When working out from and towards a specific concept in the way that I have done here, I tend to go through a series of abstracting motions. My starting point is always concrete, almost documentary. I work out from this large visual archive that I am assembling, and which I use as my basic resource for information and inspiration. I engage in a dialogue with these found pictures and their history, these fragments of reality, and I try to expand their possibilities through the translation of drawing. It is always associated with a search for an understanding of circumstances. These might be close or far from my immediate reality, but I attempt to engage emphatically, and dialectically in the investigation of them, to pass on a picture that is not an answer, but a question.

Through this process of expansion and contractions of visual information, I try to place myself in a space where I think through my medium, and remove myself from my original understanding of the specific concept, to create the possibilities of new perspectives.

How do outer forces such as globalization and international financial collapse affect refugees? Does your work in the show address these causes?

This might sound like a sidestepping answer, but the causes of anything are multiple and complex, and we would have to be serious historians/social scientists to suggest that we knew how they reacted on one another with any confidence or credibility. Conditions in the past few years have gotten worse, but if you go back in history, conditions have always been bad, or at least it's hard to say if they have ever been good. We don't think this show addresses causes, if anything it addresses a few horrible effects of causes.

Tent cities have existed in the U.S. for decades, what do these pop-up communities say about American society as a whole?

Disaster: There's a multitude of things one could read into tent cities, but I'm not sure that it reveals anything specific to American social policy as much as it reveals more general aspects of the human condition. One thing that I see is individuals' creative energy and resourcefulness when faced with social conditions that will not support them.

All the endless newspaper articles I've read about foreclosures and lay-offs leave me wondering where the people who are being affected by those economic contractions are going. Some move in with their parents, some go into public housing, some take to the street on any number of levels.

I think tent cities are considered a kind of living on the street to many, because only a certain kind of desperation drives people to the outskirts of civilization, in this case often vacant lots without any infrastructure. But that infrastructure is improvised, the delicate semblance of a city is built with cloth and tent poles, and community is just as alive there as it would be in the suburbs, if not even more alive.

I see this act of creative improvisation under difficult conditions as essentially hopeful, but I realize this is an optimistic position. Because the individual takes steps to make life out of a social environment that unabashedly creates hardships without taking the responsibility for its own failure, I see hope and optimism in the resilience of individuals, and a fundamental shortcoming of a society that will not maintain livable conditions for its own people.


Above: Work by Imminent Disaster

From Imminent Disaster's 2009 Show at Thinkspace

Do you see a relationship between your own street art (which is ephemeral by nature) and the theme of human transience that you address in the show?

Disaster: There is something to be said about being in the moment, and the moment in the modern world is about instant change and unending forward motion. Those things that don't keep pace with the world's constant newness will be labeled backwards, stale, conservative, indigenous, or just left completely behind. I think because the ephemerality of everything is an overwhelming social condition right now, it is also an interest to artists who are a part of that society, or in some cases directly address society through their work.

Armsrock: Addressing the subject of ephemeral art will have to happen with the environment surrounding the art in mind. In my eyes, there is a difference in making works that are ephemeral in an environment such as the urban landscape, where transience and change seems to me to be the permanent condition, and then working with aspects of the ephemeral in the static environment of the traditional and commercial exhibition spaces.

The latter becomes a direct critique of the venue where the work is shown, and the commercial mechanism surrounding this, where as the first is more an attempt to engage in, and work, with the process that dominates the environment given.

That being said, there are not many ephemeral objects in this show. It does deal with matters of transience, but its range of subjects are broader than that.

Some of the work presented deals with refuge in the sense of a condition imposed on one group of people by circumstances, or other people, another part of the work deals with the self-imposed refuge, the blind-fields that we are creating in our structures of observation and understanding. Among these things is also a critique of the art itself as a spectacular and aestheticized refuge from reality.



Work by Armsrock

Are you looking forward to showing and collaborating with Armsrock? You have shown together before; how long have you been acquainted?

Imminent Disaster: Yes yes! We had a show together in 2008, but this is the first time we've collaborated on an installation.

You are extremely eloquent and decisive in explaining your works. Since this show is political and aimed at raising awareness, will there be any textual accompaniment with the visual works? Or would you rather the viewers infer meaning for themselves?

This work is political in that it is derived from social conditions that are fundamentally against life. It is not political in the sense that is attempting to intervene in society in the manner of activism or pragmatism: we are not offering solutions as a urban designer or policymaker might, there are no itemized lists, there is no singular cause that is being targeted for immediate change.

Neither is this show about raising awareness, and that is because people are already aware. In this age of ubiquitous media, it is impossible to not hear at least echoes of the world's grinding machinery…genocide in Darfur, coup in Honduras, death in Haiti. It's not at all that people are unaware; it is perhaps a bleaker picture than that. People are aware and no emotion rises up inside of them, or it is stifled by feelings of futility towards the individual's ability to change global conditions. If this show has any hope in arising change in it's viewers, it's on the level of compassion, of seeing the fragility of each human being, of valuing life.

Check out Refuge at Thinkspace Gallery. The opening reception is this Friday, March 12th, from 7-11pm.

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