"Foxcroft is a video installation consisting of five vintage dollhouses displayed on a platform covered with live sod. In the style of Cinema Verite, the Foxcroft collaborative recorded themselves, their homes, their families, and the Dayton region with minimal directorial intrusion. This footage is projected into each house and viewers are required to peer in through the windows to witness the lives unfolding within. A single soundscape connects the entire neighborhood.

Dollhouses are sites of play, and places to envision and enact the domestic sphere and future possibilities. In Foxcroft, 1950’s tin litho dollhouses become viewing apparatuses to the lives of seven Ohio youth. Tensions between reality and fantasy, the teenagers’ aspirations and cultural expectations, and self-identity and perceptions by others are amplified but ultimately inseparable."

Student Artist:
Matt Clark, Columbus College of Art and Design

Youth Participants:
Nikki Crowell, Trotwood
Kier Dorman, Dayton
Samantha Enright, Dayton
Ben Hoogsteden, Dayton
Marissa Williams, Dayton
Jeremy Young, Centerville

"Byzantine is a wall-sized painting that explores themes of hybridity, excess, and growth. Each panel in the series functions as a man-sized porthole into a landscape alive with details, patterns and interlocking systems. This is achieved through the conglomeration of minutia piled and cobbled together to create larger, overarching systems that define the whole painting. During our time at Blue Sky, our group observed and recorded the natural environment around us in Dayton and then created individual abstract compositions and patterns out of sketches, grave rubbings, silk screens, linoleum block prints and potter’s wheel drawings.

We then incorporated these individual experiments into a 31-foot paper painting and a 50-foot wall and floor drawing, combining the abstract and the realistic, organic and inorganic, spontaneous and neurotic. Each panel of Byzantine began with the chance operation of poured ink and pigment on paper, and were subsequently populated by the youth participants with details and characters to flesh out what became, eventually, a fantastical, even grotesque, abstract environment... at once suffocating and fabulous. "

Student Artist:
Emily Burkman, Smith College: BA, June 2009

Youth Participants:
Tim Brown, Dayton
Brandi Dale, Dayton
Ray Graetz, Dayton
Tony Hoogsteden, Dayton
Sydney Joslin-Knapp, Dayton
Roseline Rodriguez, Beavercreek
Whitney Taylor, Dayton

"Dayton is a fascinating subject to explore: it is multi-layered and contradictory, with a weighty history and an uncertain future. Since the 1960s, the population of Dayton has been in steady decline. Downtown Dayton once was a bustling center of commerce, industry and innovation, yet today most businesses have closed or are struggling to stay afloat. Commerce continues to buzz on the outskirts of Dayton today, but that activity rarely finds its way downtown.

Over the summer, the group worked together to devise a host of artistic activities investigating ways to reflect, represent, converse with and intervene in this environment. Projects included stop-action animations, public interventions in collaboration with other Blue Sky groups, and floating mobile installations, all of which took different approaches to the complex subject of Dayton. "

Student Artist:
Artem Voevodin, University of Dayton

Youth Participants:
Diana Colonia, Dayton
Tessa Kellner, Kettering
Wesley Langford, Dayton
Ariel Phoenix, Dayton
Travis Waller,, Dayton

"We are investigating what it means to observe. And, how explorations of beauty, value, object-ness and transformation through our perceived perceptual and technological limits, can expose changes that take place internally.

Thousands of origami, some constructed of paper inform us of shifting cultural and empirical amalgamations. Focused radiation, scattered as a result of the presence of tiny particles of gold, is made visible to the naked eye through their suspension in a chemical solution. What do these experiences tell us about the qualities of both our un-aided and our technologically extended ways of seeing? The transformative events that occur in our lifetimes and beyond continue to allow us access to ourselves and to wonder at our world.

What trust do we put in the things that surround us? We assess that they are real, that they have weight, mass, volume and that they exist on relative scales of worth. We participate unconsciously, confronting materials, manipulations and natural phenomena. And through the witnessing of these things we determine the balance of our perceptions.

The framing of our intuitive associations with the very edge of our technical means gives us cause for self-reflection. When do we know things? What is built into our physiology and what is learned? We continue to achieve, to become new—to redefine ourselves through the advancement of our thoughts and technologies. We imagine, design, make, and we destroy—and we accumulate associations as we do memories: as flickering visions, while we continually move towards question after question. "

Student Artist:
Nick Voegele, Sinclair Community College

Youth Participants:
Charvon Knight, Clayton
Victoria Postway, Dayton
Alex Reynolds, Dayton
DeMarcus Sledge, Dayton
Melody Snyder, Kettering
Sarah Workman, Dayton


         

"To Me You are a Work of Art is about memory/history and the physical space that it is generated in and how those memories/ histories can be accessed through choreographic exploration and video construction. I want to train my lens as an artist on the possible layered connections that exist.

What can these places tell us about race, class and gender?

Can a physical space contain the essence of the past?

And can we tap into that information in a contemporary sense, is there the residual energy of “being.”

This exploration culminates in a video art installation combined with a choreographed dance solo generated from the project material created in the process. "

Student Artist:
Sara Sexton, Columbus College of Art and Design

Youth Participants:
Tim Barker, Dayton
Curtis Brown, Kettering
De’Narrow Brown, Centerville
Danton Chambers, Dayton
Chris Miskell, Miamisburg
A.C. Taylor, Dayton

"The Pit is a collaborative painting, installation, and performance created specifically for the first floor and basement of the Excelsior Lofts building in Dayton, Ohio. Rodney Veal, Katherine Mann, Sarah Sexton, Emily Burkman and the thirteen youth participants in their respective groups collaborated to first transform the pit into a painting and dance spectacle in early July, when youth participants in Rodney's group performed a dance on the bottom level of the pit while Katherine's youth participants poured and shot watered-down paint on them from above.

The performance was repeated a second time a few weeks later with only Rodney in the pit while the youth participants threw paint on the dancer, walls and floor in a choreographed rhythm. The paint, swirled and mixed by its journey from bucket to super-soaker to dancer's soles to floor, was then allowed to pool and dry--providing a history of the two dances. Katherine Mann's group then went back into the dried remnants and used them as a foundation for a mural and floor painting--upon which Rodney Veal's group created two more dances.

Created in an empty, unused space in a historic building, the Pit pieces sought to combine disciplines and build upon layers of experience. Each progressive activity in the pit built upon the one before--and each referred to spectacle, epic fantasy, the tracking of movement and bodies, and layers of history created in one space."