Steve McGuire

Steve McGuire

In recent years, I have grown to fully appreciate that my creative work emanates from a “do it yourself aesthetic” and is attentive to  assemblage and the junction of storytelling, visual art and performance.

June 2010

Presidential Faculty Fellowship

Single Speed Geography - Assemblage as Object/Event Continuum

Assemblage as Object/Event Continuum is centered on the creation of an exhibition and storytelling. The exhibition (drawings) and performance emanate from time-trial by bicycle, in self-supported fashion, on a primitive and remote route of single track and jeep trails through forgotten Continental Divide passes in Alberta, British Columbia, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado. It's typically consecutive 18 + hour days in the saddle for me.

Time trialing, whether across the Flint Hills of Kansas, South to North across Wisconsin, across Northern Minnesota or Alaska in the dead of winter, or the Continental Divide, is a template and prompt for exploring the relationship — beautiful, and always complicated — between mind, body and nature. To be sure, navigating the trade-offs of sensibilities is required. Unbridled intensity versus mindfulness, and exaltation versus getting on with it - awkward and imprecise exchanges, to be sure. Riding single speed (why not singlespeed?), 170,000 feet of elevation gain, you add something seen to something done. It's beautiful.

The drawings, in a straight forward manner, serve as a record of the event.

How does assemblage preserve a memory of an event? What constitutes residue of objects and events? Objects change in the context of events. Is it the same object at all during or after the event? Assemblage as Object/Event Continuum is multilevel and time-based: doing begets exhibition. Working with a “performance map”, the project intersects with audiences at three junctures: following me on Google Earth via SPOT Tracker, storytelling performances and the exhibition. The exhibition and story explore the work of assemblage. The project, and by extension the exhibition, draws a line, as it were, between performance and objects. Drawing this line is the “do it yourself aesthetic" of assemblage.”

This project builds upon recent work from a 2007 Arts and Humanities Grant (The Poetics of Endurance) and a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts Grant (On The American Discovery Trail), and, workshops conducted at both the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Pennsylvania State University.

Consistent with previous projects this one will return to my teaching directly in the form of a new course in the SAAH: Assemblage as Object/Event Continuum. Extending the concept of multilevel and time-based to the course, it will be offered to on campus students and to students at other Regents institutions electronically. The on campus section of the course has already filled for the fall 2010 semester. My plan, per invitation from UI-UC is to take UI students to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for the fall 2010 exhibition and performance and to work with UI-UC students.

Water color/graphite, 66"x44"

Water color/graphite,  37" x 25"

Other recent projects:

by-Cycle Eminent Icelandic Saga (Spring 2005)