We’re hosting the first annual Rabbit Island Benefit on June 1st in NYC to raise money for this summer’s Artists in Residence (75%) and the conservation of parcels of land in Detroit during the annual fall tax auction (25%). Over the past two seasons visiting artists have supported themselves while traveling to the island. This year we are attempting to help our residents with a small amount of financial assistance. We’re also attempting to exemplify the idea that doing or making should be tied to conservation. It’s a good formula. Please join us.
Participating Artists include: Ron Gorchov, Mike Perry, Liz Clark, Annie Varnot, Aaron Wexler, Lucy Engelman, Andrew Ranville, Miwa Koizumi, Archie Lee Coates IV, Ports Bishop, Emilie Lee, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Christian De Vietri, Nicole Lavelle, Charlotte X.C Sullivan, Miles Mattison, Sara Maynard, Yuko Oda, Jennifer Maravillas, Leif Parsons, Tolland Mansfield, Nicole Lavelle, Meg Whiteford, Marlin Ledin, Kelly Geary, Isabella Martin, Mary Rothlisberger, Hayley Severns, Sara Darnell, Emily Julka, Helen Lovelee and many more.
+ $25 tickets can be purchased online or at the door.
+ Facebook event page
+ Invitation by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis of LoT Architecture. Thanks guys.
Photos: emily julka and rob gorski
Andrew Ranville’s TEDx talk is now online.
This print will be available at the upcoming Rabbit Island Benefit in NYC on June 1st, on our online island shop when it launches in the near future (gallery + experiment in commerce + crowd sourcing + preservation), and will hopefully inspire many island dance collaborations. Form expressed beautifully, after all, is a simple and stylish pursuit. Like wilderness, it is classic and will remain graceful and unchanged in perpetuity. Art has often been inspired by wilderness historically, of course, but amidst the modern context of divided land can the creation of wild spaces of scale for their own sake be inspired by art? Can it be considered art? Can it even be done?
We’re excited to be a part of the first ever TEDx event hosted in northern Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. The event is sponsored by Michigan Technological University this Saturday, March 23rd, between 9:30am and 7pm EDT. The theme of the event is Journeys.
Andrew Ranville, Rabbit Island’s founding Artist in Residence, will be speaking about his experience living on the island over the past two summers and how it has affected his arts practice and world view. He’ll also be talking a bit about what’s coming up for the project. Currently he’s en-route from London, UK, and will be landing later tonight up north so long as the runways are clear of snow.
Tickets are sold out but the talks will be broadcast live online. Andrew’s talk will be opening the event just after 9:30am EDT so make sure to log on early!
Cheers to everyone who put the energy into organizing this event. Michigan’s Copper Country is so darn special.
Sarah Darnell, one of the Cabin-Time crew members who spent some time with us this past summer just released a publication of drawings related to the work she did on the island.
Pick up your copy for only $6 from Issue Press, an independent publisher of art books and prints in Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Cabin-Time recently completed the fourth chapter of their nomadic camp earlier this month in northern Michigan’s Wilderness State Park. Check out some photos of their trip.
We’re looking forward to collaborating with Cabin-Time again in the future. Remember to save a copy for the Rabbit Island library, Sarah!
The good folks at the The Alpine Review will be featuring some text and photographs from Rabbit Island in their second issue, out this spring.
The Montreal-based bi-annual magazine tracks art, culture and ideas around the world. Below are a few words from the preface of the inaugural print. They remind us a bit, perhaps, of sentiments found in Foucault’s The Order of Things.
Exploring ‘the order of things’ is definitely a premise of the island project. Can the civilized and the native become more sensible complements via better organization? Can the collusion of modern ideas (genetics, the web, mapping, social business, art, etc.), lead to new, more fundamentally classic, rules than currently stand as policy? Can metaphors from a remote island apply to a broader setting? We’re hopeful. Regardless, we’re excited to collaborate with this beautiful new publication.
These are fascinating times. It is a common vanity to believe that one’s generation is the most tumultuous, most evolving and most important. Perhaps it is is true. Perhaps it is nothing more than historical narcissism. Nevertheless, there is an uncanny feeling that something profound is taking place at this very moment. This is not a gradual evolution. This is an accelerating shake-up spanning industries and cultures: a massive tearing-down, redesign and renovation of processes, systems, structures and perspectives.
The magnitude of these rapid changes intrigued and discomforted me. After speaking to friends and colleagues it became clear that I was not the only one. I realized that the passage of time, the impetus of career and excesses of consumerism had started making me numb; like the pins and needles that climb into your toes when you’ve been still for too long, I felt compelled to shake it out. It was time for a new project: The Alpine Review.
[…]
Modernity rarely allows us the luxury and liberty of mindful reflection and I have been truly fortunate to spend a year doing just that: traveling, discussing and debating with people I admire, connecting with new projects, and actually taking the time to look listen and question. What started as an exciting conversation with my co-editor has snowballed into a compendium of ideas and observations from people all around the world trying to make sense of things. I’m honored to present you with the inaugural issues of The Alpine Review.
Louis-Jacques Darveau, Editor
This is going to be a helluva collaboration.
In September the phone rang in New York, about a month after most of the activity on the island was wrapping up. It was Liz Clark.
“I was wondering if I could visit Rabbit Island later this year. I’m coming back and am going to start writing a book. I’d love to find someplace quiet.”
We said yes, of course, but since we weren’t set up for late-season expeditions to the island—cold weather gales, no enclosed shelter, a frigid lake—we decided to push her residency back to this upcoming summer and are currently working on the logistics from opposite sides of the globe. (Liz is somewhere in French Polynesia right now.)
Liz Clark has a good story. Since 2006 she has been sailing her 40 foot sailboat, Swell, solo around the remote atolls of the South Pacific. She set off from southern California after college and sailed down the coast of Baja Mexico and Central America. After that she made a break for the Galapagos Islands, and then, in a single charge, went for it across the Pacific. Just imagine—a young woman, a sailboat, the Pacific ocean, twenty-eight thousand miles, and, well, six incredible years.
Liz also happens to be a really good surfer and a committed environmental writer. So good in fact, and so well-intentioned, that she’s been given the title Surf Ambassador by a company in California you might’ve heard of.
Though we digress, perhaps. Let’s imagine a few sailing details for a moment: The number of days she’s spent on a sailboat—cruising solo for more time than it takes to earn an undergraduate degree; the number of times she’s glanced at the wake parting with regular irregularity behind Swell; the sound of halyards clanking against an aluminum mast and how they must’ve faded into the background, like sirens in New York City; the slap of the mainsail’s leech at different points of sail; the number of times she has checked her tells; the instincts she has developed towards her rigging; the number of days she’s been soaked at the helm; the feeling of securing hatches in weather before ducking below for a night, thousands of miles from land; the maintenance she’s performed during a constant battle with salinity; the trust developed between sailor and ship; the occasional notes from a digital navigation instrument, or static over a long-range radio.
It is difficult to conceive.
Sailing is compelling. Sailing is intrinsically a matter of good design. That is, if you are sailing, you are part of an elegant and functional idea manifested physically. You are connected to the physical world with sophisticated intention and simple execution, few degrees from baseline laws. (The same can be said of surfing, of course, and this mustn’t be a coincidence.)
In design and purpose, Rabbit Island and Liz’s voyage have similarities. On both island and sailboat less is more, and simplicity is ideal, because you have to choose carefully what you bring. In fact we’d love the island to become analogous to a well-designed sailboat. It is a nice idea.
Liz has been illustrating intelligent principles with precision during her voyage, living a well-curated life born initially of choice, and then, while at sea, necessity. She is leaving little trace and impacting the wider culture. She’s been traveling under the power of wind, generating electricity from the sun, eating fish and fruit from her surroundings, accounting for inputs and outputs, writing, surfing, and—most interestingly—becoming a scholar of the ocean via experience, witnessing every inch of water along a zig-zagging line of jibes, runs, beats and reaches between California and French Polynesia.
Liz has seen the plastic, swam the changing coral beds, dodged the container ships, reefed her sails through weather, witnessed the effects of overfishing on island communities, seen the spoiling of paradises via development. But she’s also witnessed the diamonds that have been spared such fates and the remnants of wild places near the antipode of North America. She went for it and has spent six years noting the byproducts of our land-based externalities on the sea.
Every day, every night, every sunset, every storm on the horizon, she’s taken record amidst the most remote expanse of water in the world. She has been crossing the ocean while we’ve been on land.
It is said that the only thing people have, really, is their experience—the books that they’ve read, the people that they’ve related to, the art they have seen, the language they’ve been taught, the lands they have visited, the family that instilled values within them. We are excited to have the opportunity to learn from her experiences, share our own, and create dialogue amongst the island’s resident artists, writers, builders and chefs.
This spring she’ll be taking a sabbatical from sailing and will begin creating a written record of her story. During July and August she’ll be spending some time on Rabbit Island.
Which brings us to surfing. Liz has surfed some of the best breaks in the world but she’s never seen the rocky shoal off the southeast point of Rabbit Island on a windy day. We can see it now, an angry summer front pushing a strong east wind across the sandstone reef. Sizable lake sets. Glaring sun. Liz will be the third person to surf Rabbit Island, and there’s little doubt she’ll show the first two how it’s done. But that’s cool. Really, who can compete with proper California kid on a wave.
If anyone knows how our life on land—what we consume, what we create, what runs off, how we divide it, and the story of stuff—effect our broader world, it’s probably Liz Clark. Who better then to invite to our residency on a patch of land that was spared development, harvest and subdivision, to brainstorm ways to organize things more intelligently and celebrate the continued existence of natural places of scale.
And one more thing. Perhaps the best part—which we haven’t told her yet because it’s a bit of a secret. We’d been following her blog for several years, living vicariously through her as she sailed Swell across the Pacific. This is part of what makes the collaboration so special; the serendipity of it all; ideas coming together; a phone call out of the blue from across the web.
May good things come!