Caitlin Emma Perkins
Playing Telephone With Ghosts
Various locations throughout 2007
Curated by Robert Wuilfe
"The Junto, after several private meetings and adjournments at the Theater of Scandal, in Fourth Street, during two long weeks past, and at a prodigious waste of paper, and much inkshed, have at last sent forth one Benjamin Towne with a stink pot in his hand."
-18th century text, Philadelphia
Playing Telephone with Ghosts by artist Caitlin Emma Perkins is a pliable mixture of fact and fiction, of seriousness and frivolity, of artistic virtue and humorous indulgence celebrating the synchronistic streets of Philadelphia. It draws from the worlds of printmaking, performance art, historical research, the culinary arts and parapsychology. It is a project filled to bursting with ephemera, sociétés secrète, culinary excursions, clandestine meetings, literary investigations and pataphysical technologies. Throughout 2007, Perkins will present a series of participatory public events and web-based projects designed to slowly initiate visitors into a deeper understanding of our much-clouded politico-communal histories. Join Perkins as she disinters the writings of Swift, Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes, plumbs the considerable depths of the Founding Fathers tippling habits and learns how to prepare the perennial 18th Century feast, Pigeons Transmogrified.
Follow along throughout the year at a Secret Cafe, internet projects, Grand Public Readings and perhaps a Seance or two. Then, join us at a date to be announced for a culminating exhibition in which deeper meaning will be elucidated...
Major Project Events:
Secret Café, Powel House Museum, February 2007
Foolscaps and Inskshed, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, May 2007
Foolscaps and Inkshed
A Playing Telephone with Ghosts event
An interstate historical romp of an evening...Facilitating portable reading and entertainment for men, women and children of leisure and toil...
Inspired by the Philadelphia almanac printing industry of the 18th Century, join artists Caitlin Perkins and Katie Baldwin along with other cohorts in a traveling print shop and bindery at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art for a hands on evening of printmaking wonder!
A foolscap is a standard size sheet of paper folded three times to make eight leaves, creating a signature of 16 pages. It also happens to be the most common size of almanac printed in the early days of the U.S. Inspired by the early Philadelphia almanacs, Perkins and Baldwin will create a collection of printed ephemera which participants may take home. These works of art will be full of historical anecdotes, prescriptive literature, recipes, maxims and mayhem. All this fun within the margins of some simple sheets of paper greased with a little bit of ink and humor!
The activities will include woodblock relief printing, screen-printing and a simple bookbinding activity so that participants leave with their own little collection of ephemera.
Click on images below to advance slideshow.
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