Johnson Jackson Chaffin — installation artist, musician
Restoration Resident — February 2006
My experience was one of sustentation, rejuvenation, inspiration and accommodation.
I happened upon A Studio in the Woods while at KCAI in 2004 and had considered the studio as I was also considering a Missouri parks program and an Everglades park residency; the environment is truly what I have always sought out. That was two years ago. This fall, while residencies elsewhere were accommodating all of the artists away from New Orleans, while I was traveling between Houston and New Orleans, holding shows there for myself and other New Orleans artists so that we could continue to work and live here, I found ASITW again. They were here, holding fast, offering a residency to keep artists here and the city from becoming an artless vacuum. They made it a possibility to work and live here without needing to make a million trips to Houston. Those trips were fruitful and edifying but the work and exhibitions need to happen here, especially now. They are sustainers of this vital need.
The hours are quite different from my normal life and without distraction. I ate properly and had fun cooking again. I went from being awake from 11am-3am to being awake from 6am-11pm. I slept and ate better than I have because it was available and I was not in a starving process, somewhere umbilically attached to my studio. Instead, I wrote music all day long, while sitting on a barge in the Mississippi. I had three squares, my river and the forest and still, an indoor studio all to wander and be refreshed by. I felt very taken care of and hence, allowed to concentrate fully and fruitfully. The place breathes life into you.
The inspiration from the studio is everywhere. The batturement: walk it as far as it goes and be amazed. The river: sit and never want for looking. The ships: peruse their industrial majesty. The forest, at day and night: alive with sound and activity and awe-inspiring post-storm geometry and paradigm. There is no shortage of source for inspiration. For me, the tranquility and interaction of the forest, the ships and their ants, the river that I love to tears. Every thing I needed was here.
Accommodation comes in many forms. All of the contacts I could not fathom or reach, Lucianne and Ama were able to lead me to. This accommodation included dimension on not only approaching the contact in regards to the work, but also in what capacity to represent and describe the work. Think of them like part-phonebooks that have all of the numbers and friendships of people who can make anything possible in this city. I know they did that for me.
Johnson Jackson Chaffin
Biography
american traveller, uninterested in fiscal well-being. spent young years on farms and in a state park (Georgia), homeless but well forested. formal education (KCAI) served this purpose: to mature into my skin as a sculptor and installationist. supplant the culture of seeing with opportunities for the entire sensory arsenal as well as harmony within the work's environment. spend my life edifying and assisting others in this form of self-expression -with the intent of/to be realized ultimately- as a form of self-empowerment. To do this one must lose the ego and deny fashion, for no individuality ever existed in fashion. second guess yourself. admit that you do not know and are not in complete control (a lie, anyway) and you have just admitted that you are willing to let your work live and harmonize with its space rather than conquer it. Otherwise, as a dead artist once told me (while drawing flies), everything you make is stillborn and meritless, a rank fly plunged into amber the second it emerges, corrupted by its parent’s fear and its fate. remember this: all true art lives. and what is life?
