Borrowing its name from an essay by Michel Foucault — he writes that “in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up” — Other Spaces was begun in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the news that we would be confined to our homes for something like the 40 days that originally defined the term quarantine, Brian began constructing a 12-foot skiff with a frame of bent oak and fir, eventually stretching translucent nylon over it as a skin. After the first year of isolation, we made cyanotypes of the shadows cast by the boat’s frame on cotton cloth, to be sewn into sails. What began as a lightweight extension of a sculptural boat-building practice became an inseparable part of our daily lives for the 2½ years during which the boat literally occupied our living space. The strangeness of building a boat on the balcony of a mountainside apartment 726 feet above the LA basin’s sea level seemed to match the situation. The boat perched on the balcony became like a high-flying quarantine signal.
Begun May 2020
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
—Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 1967
Instagram post, April 4, 2021:
This update comes with the realization that the life of a boat is one of constantly replaced parts. This is an ancient truism —“some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel” (Plutarch, Theseus, 23.1) The last post of this vessel showed it looking very similar. What goes unseen in the first picture is the boat’s decision (in the middle of a photo session, the day before the November election) to become a not very successful flying machine—landing in a tree 2 stories below our balcony with broken ribs, and a number of other injuries. Now restored, work continues toward a launch—water- not airborne.
From the shadows cast by the boat’s frame, a series of cyanotype photograms have been made. The sail—a four sided balanced lug rig—is also made from cotton cyanotypes of the hull frame.
The hull is covered in Dacron sail cloth which is heat shrunk to be drum tight. It was then varnished to make it water tight. The keel, skeg, and oar locks were added.
