The following description of Circularspace Mail Art Exhibit, and a breif history of mail art is posted at the Exhibit at Butterfield Too Art Gallery.
“Circularspace”
A Mail Art Exhibition
About “Circularspace”
“Circularspace” is a term coined by CIRCLE founder, Kate Miller to describe the activity of mailing collaborative art worldwide. This exhibit was begun in summer of 2009 upon the establishment of the Internet organization, CIRCLE (Community for the Inspired Realization of Creative Life Experience)
Since its inception more than 150 pieces, each a collaborative effort between two artists, have been collected.
The collection includes works by professional artists, published authors, poets, teachers, students, and many other interested creative people.
Among the work is a group of mail art pieces that were exchanged between children from one art class in New York City to another in Tampa, Florida.
Circularspace boasts of works from at least 35 states and six countries.
About Mail Art:
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art (but also music, sound art, poetry, creative writing, collage etc.) through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art. Its main promoter was Ray Johnson (1927-1995) who, with his New York Correspondence [sic] School, institutionalized the free exchange of postal messages between artist and artist or between artist and audience." Ray Johnson's Correspondence Art provided Mail Art with a blueprint for the future of Mail Art.
In spite of the many links and similarities between historical avant-gardes, alternative art practices and Mail Art, what sets the creative postal network apart from any traditional artistic movement, school or group (including Fluxus) is its complete openness, an absence of hierarchies, and a disregard for the rules of the official “art system” and the commercialism of the art market. Anybody can participate in the postal network and exchange artworks. Participants are invited to take part in collective projects, such as this one put on by the organization, CIRCLE, in which entries are not selected or judged, Mail Art generally operates within a spirit of “anything goes”.
Mail Art has been exhibited in alternative spaces such as private apartments, municipal buildings, and shop windows, as well as in galleries and important Museums worldwide. For many mail artists, the process of exchanging ideas and the sense of belonging to a global community that is able to maintain a peaceful collaboration beyond differences of language, religion and ideology, is valued above the aesthetic merits of the artworks that are swapped or created together. It is what differentiates the Mail Art network from the world of commercial picture postcards and of simply “mailed art”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art
Chuck Welch, editor of “Eternal Network – a Mail Art Anthology”, (University of Calgary Press, Calgary 1995) is quoted putting it this way, “Cultural exchange is a radical act. It can create paradigms for the reverential sharing and preservation of the earth. The ethereal networker aesthetic calls for guiding that dream through action. Cooperation and participation, and the celebration of art as a birthing of life, vision, and spirit are first steps. The artists who meet each other in the Eternal Network have taken these steps. Their shared enterprise is a contribution to our common future.
About CIRCLE:
CIRCLE is an organization of artists/ writers/ poets etc. who are devoted to seeking out ways to make life a more creative and therefore more satisfying experience and sharing that sentiment with others.
It is the mission of CIRCLE to bring together artists of all disciplines through hosted events, projects and community so that we can make opportunities for:
1. Development of personal artistic potential through exposure to diversity and interactive activity. 2. The sharing of the transcendent power of the arts.
3. Generating human creative energy geared towards personal enrichment and positive change in the world
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