The 181

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Abby Donovan dragging a sail over the mountain road

181 suitcase

guest collaborator Charlotte Thurman making sandcastles along the road

guest collaborator Jacob Zimmerman pushing a sculpture down the road in darkness, sculpture looks like some sort of light or sound funnel

Tom Hughes walking and balancing his light focusing/projecting lens piece

guest collaborator Brittany De Nigris dragging a sculpture constructed on top of a skateboard, which broke down as she dragged it along the road

Brandon Boan with a ping pong paddle over a see-saw contraption. This image and those above made by Greta Ruekgauer.

A collective based in the United States, the 181 (when uttered, sounds like the one-eight-one), self-describes as:

Artists, a physicist/electronic engineer/musician, a mushroom forager/rockhound, and a linotype operator—any attempts to formalize their practice they view with distress..

Members, respectively, are Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes (Newark, Delaware and Eugene, Oregon, Jason Rhodes (Bend, Oregon) and Brandon Boan (Old Fort, North Carolina). These four met at the University of Delaware where Donovan serves as Head of Ceramics and Coordinator of Graduate Studies. The University hosts a growing public archive of images of actions, performances and compositions created by the collective on ARTSTOR.

The 181 formed in 2007 with a composition that took place by the pacific ocean. Venice Beach, California, to be more precise. The artists, with their materials in tow--some yardage of lavender vinyl, a fishbowl, a foam “Q”, a movie projector gathered near a winter trash channel that is created each year to carry refuse from the streets out to sea

Working in varied locations, often public spaces such as rest stops, state parks and forests and with arts organizations that embrace experimental artworks, some project places include:

Locust Projects, Miami, FL, USA, THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF INFINITY ON ITS SIDE (O DISSIPATION)

Mission Street Arts, Jemez Springs, NM, USA, Tilde; at the coming of the night

Cose Cosmiche, Milan, Italy, Considerations Relating to the Shape of Equilibrium and reprise (2018)

Freesbsong, Oregon, USA

Hemlock House, North Carolina, USA, Coffey's Red Shoes

Unsmoke Systems, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Cyclopean Stonewares and at the Coming of Night

Practice Gallery, Philadelphia, Tellus (a word belonging almost entirely to poetry)

Novella Gallery, New York, FOR LO FUTURITY

Unity Gallery, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, IA, USA There is hope but not for us

Vicki Projects, Newburgh, N.Y., USA, The division of mound exploration

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Oh I think I know where the green ray goes

NCCA, Kronstadt, Russia, Moving Pauses (holding our breath for celestial feedback and the line, perhaps, of perpetual snow)

Yesterday has not been born

Tom Hughes wearing his constructed lens at the outset of a parade of sorts, over a mountain road in Jemez Springs, NM, October 2020.

At the conclusion of the procession down a mountain road, the 181 and guest collaborators converged at a gazebo in the town park in Jemez, removed their shoes and all pressed play, somewhat in/out of sync, on Lionel Richie's All Night Long and danced until the last play of the song dissipated.

Broadsheet for TILDE; at the coming of the night printed by Triangle Poster, Pittsburgh, PA

Tilde; at the coming of the night, Jemez Springs NM, October 2020

Their work and research is iterative, situational, cumulative and circuitous. The 181 loops loops, or as Nicholas Petrow wrote, like the visual feedback loop produces by a wormhole or, as Sun Ra wrote on his application to NASA's Innovative Utilization of the Space Station Program if you don't have the proper type of music your program will be more difficult than need be.

The one-eight-one's most recent series of compositions, as of March 2022, is documented in a blog post produced by Locust Projects Miami.

A series of images, videos and words offer views into the collective's research leading up to their 2022 exhibition THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF INFINITY ON ITS SIDE (O DISSIPATION). The reader of this blog post watches a shop vac through various forms of a looking glass, twirls with the shadow of a spinning bike wheel and tire, seemingly smooshed by the black space flanking the footage, and watches a kite flicker in a snowy sky before being plunged into bubbly darkness--beneath the surface of a hot spring somewhere in Oregon. There is also footage of hands out of car windows, passing vehicles and landscapes, hands, diagrams and their shadows. All the while there are is a cat meowing, a dog barking, music on the car radio, the vacuum of course, train sounds and underwater gurgles.

The exhibition opened in February 2022 with a live event in a small and dark room within the Locust Projects gallery space. An impression of the experience of this occurrence was published in the Miami Chronicles.

When asked how they know that a piece has ended the 181 has responded that compositions usually end because someone wants to go home, or lock the door.

References

This article "The 181" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:The 181. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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