Want to get away from it all — really get away from it all? Try Twenty-Three Days at Sea, a residency on a container ship.
Lead Image: A cargo ship
This is the second year for the residency, which is sponsored by Burrard Arts Foundation and Access Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. “The aim of this residency program is to generate a new work or body of work (which, depending upon the artists’ practices, may take place aboard the vessel or in the months following) in response to the sea voyage, which will then be exhibited before audiences at Access Gallery in the following months,” reads the prospectus. “For the extent of the residency voyage, artists will also be requested to keep a daily log. Subsequently published by Access, these logbooks will accumulate as an ongoing collection of bookworks, chronicling diverse responses to a shared experience of being at sea.”
The artist travels on a working cargo ship that departs from Vancouver and crosses the Pacific Ocean to Shanghai, China, where the artist is flown back to Vancouver. There’s no Internet, no cell service, and candidates need to be healthy and ready for whatever the sea throws at them. “There are many hundreds of residency programs worldwide,” reads the prospectus. “Twenty-Three Days at Sea follows the ‘aberrant’ turn in artist residencies, in that it imposes specific conditions and constraints (the strictures of the port; the solitude of the freighter cabin; the expanse of the open sea) that will, in turn shape artists’ ideas and work. It offers the opportunity to integrate critical and creative practices into a new set of parameters, and the potential of challenging established routines, activities, and assumptions. At its base, Twenty-Three Days at Sea asks artists to question what constitutes creative space, and to consider how time is experienced over the highly charged, yet largely invisible, spatial trajectory of a trans-Pacific shipping route. It offers a profoundly generative time and space — in the unconventional studio space of the cargo ship cabin — for focused research and the creation of provocative new ideas and work.”
Deadline is February 15 for submissions. For more information, click here.
