Instead of quarantine, how lovely it would be to participate in an artist residency. To pack my running shoes, whisk, oats, and hearty collection of yellow objects and travel somewhere new. Stay there for a week or a few months.
Moving home, with room and board provided and no concrete plans until July, I imagined I could manufacture something like this for myself. After all, it seemed that the main differences between my situation at home and an artist residency was the lack of unknowns, lack of external structure, and lack of public legitimacy. The first two I was confident I could approximate on my own, and the third posed a delightful challenge— how legitimate did I want this to become? Have its own website, own Instagram? I might pretend as though I have a cohort, as though this were a normal residency, and manufacture all of the components. Perhaps this fabrication would become the work itself. So the Reed residency was to become The Reed Residency.
But I was recently offered a job. I would have been a fool to turn it down, so endless, open summer weeks now slot into a 9-5.
As has been a recurring necessity for the past two months, I’ve pivoted and begun to search for the advantages of my new situation. I have a three day weekend every weekend. I work from home and have given myself an hour lunch break everyday. Despite having not recently created many things that I would instinctually categorize as physical art objects, I have still been creative since school ended. And the drive to make has plagued me ever since I stopped my Dailies Instagram project.
I’ve been writing more. When I decided to add The Reed Residency to my website, I glanced at the “blog” option and it stared me down. With the same daily possibilities that made Dailies so exciting, a blog seems fitting. Frightening, in some ways— more deserving and accepting of vulnerability. So definitely fitting.
I have a small collection of ideas and writings I’ll probably post in the coming weeks. But other than this I have no expectations. I have not created a set of rules for The Reed Residency. I have no idea what this is going to look like. What an almost-paralyzing-but-ultimately-motivationally-delicious thought.