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Indexiphilia
download Space 1026 Artists' Statement pdf
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Space 1026 Biography

Space 1026 Artists' Statement
The Aesthetics of Social Space

Space 1026 is an art gallery, studio, and printshop located in downtown Philadelphia. For the last ten years, we’ve helped define Philadelphia’s art scene – or at least one of Philadelphia’s art scenes – by providing a space for creative activity. Over this time we’ve developed, somewhat organically, a unique approach to collaborative art practice that now informs our group installations – which we’ve had the privilege to exhibit in San Francisco, Milan, Philadelphia, NY, and Toronto.

History
In order to appreciate the nature of this practice, it’s necessary to begin first with our studio, and our community. Space 1026 was founded in 1997 by a group of friends, most of whom went to art school together, and who wanted to build a space where they could share resources and work on both collaborative and individual projects. In more general terms, they wanted to create a supportive and inspiring environment where they could work and live as artists.
The early years of the Space were very much tied to skateboarding. In fact, the Space is best known to many for the skate ramp, painted by Jim Houser, that took up the center of the studio for the first few years. Skateboarders, artists and friends would all come through the studio to skate, to hang out, and to see the monthly art shows that were on display in the gallery. In this way, the Space began as a social space and a community space as much as an art space.
From the start, printmaking played a central role in the life of the studio. Posters were made for the streets – band posters, art show posters, and posters that were simply public art. Artists such as Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Ben Woodward largely made their reputation (and that of the Space’s) by wheatpasting posters up all over the streets of Philadelphia. In contrast to other large American cities, Philadelphia’s smaller scale makes it feasible for one or two artists and a bucket of wheatepaste to make a serious visual presence with a single night’s work.

Individuality within a shared context
In the early years of the Space, there were often conversations about the philosophy, spirit and ideals that the members wanted Space 1026 to embody. In these years, the original members would explain some basic ground rules for new members:
First rule: Never trash talk someone else’s art – even if you think it stinks. The most important thing is that we are all making stuff, and people should be supported for being productive and for making anything – as opposed to just sitting around getting drunk.
Second rule: Everyone that comes through the door is presumed to be a friend until proven otherwise. The early members felt that art school was so full of pretentiousness and stuck up people that they wanted to create the exact opposite environment – a space where anyone could feel comfortable and welcome, and supported in what they did.
Of course not all those who’ve passed through the space would feel as though we’ve always succeeded in upholding these two rules. Nonetheless, this general ethos privileging creative production over well defined aesthetics does persist at the Space and it defines our collective practice, which is best described as individuality within a shared context. The shared context is the building – our “commons” – that we maintain together: the screenprinting facilities, the gallery, the computer room… And it is also the identity that we take on, as members of the studio. This is what makes us somewhat unique: we straddle a fine line between a unified or collective artistic identity and a group of individual artists that happen to share a studio space. In many respects it is the tension between these poles that has given the Space and all that has come out of it its unique, slightly dysfunctional and certainly haphazard, energy.
Our gallery is an important part of the studio. Unlike many print shops where public access is limited, at the Space, we regularly invite our broader community into the studio. Every first Friday of the month there is an art opening at the Space, and beyond that there are usually one to three events a month. The Space’s gallery is available for cheap or free to friends, friends of friends, and sometimes friends of friends of friends, who need a place for an event. We also have open call art events that allow lots of people to participate in our shows – such as the flipbook festival, the prom, the food show, and the annual art auction.

Creating the commons
In her work on English peasant communities, the historian Janet Neeson writes, “A commoner’s sense of well-being came from a sense of ownership or possession, a feeling of belonging, and an overwhelming localness. This was not the ownership of a few acres (though that is surely important too) but the possession of a landscape.” This metaphor is apt for the Space as well. We’re less concerned with the painting of a landscape, or the creation of a specific ‘look’ – than we are with its possession - understood as a lived connection – a being-apart-of as opposed to a looking-in-on. This gets at one of the fundamental differences between the place-based art of Space 1026 and a more traditional conception of the artist as a singular creator. It is this double sense of ‘belonging’ (both possession of and comfort within) that we hope to create with all of the environments that we create.

Wheatpaste wall: our collective memory
In the center of our studio, down the long corridor between the back room and the front entrance, where the gallery is located, are the printing tables. The printing tables are right in the center of things, and provide an always busy, always vibrant feel to the Space – not only for the printers, but for everyone who comes through – whether for shows, for work, or just to visit. Even though not all of our members use the printing facilities, they serve as a source of energy that everyone can appreciate. As prints are made at the space, one or two copies often make their way onto the wheatpaste wall, which runs along this corridor, opposite the printing tables. The prints on the wall span from the the studio’s inception to the present. In many ways, this wall serves as our collective memory. It’s what we breathe in as the fabric of our day to day life. One member, Hanif O’Neil describes the wall “as this urban heiroglyphic, reminding everyone of the diaspora that created the space and that flows through each of us. It gives us a history and an identity to reference from time to time.”
It’s hard to characterize and impossible to quantify how powerful an effect such a background can have on the life of Space 1026; how penetrating are its stories, its dirty corners, its mélange of prints, stickers, posters, drawings… The wheatpaste wall is, both geographically and metaphorically, the center of our shared community, its heart and its soul. This wall, better than anything else, represents the ‘shared context’ or the environment, socially and materially, that our work is produced within. It embodies that landscape that we possess in common.

Re-presenting the commons: Space 1026’s recent installations
This has all been a long preface to explain some of our recent exhibitions, where we’ve been asked to represent our collaborative practice through gallery installations. It has been a process that has helped us grow as a group, and is still very much a work in progress. In 2005, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts asked us to submit a proposal for their series on artist collectives. We were given a slot in January 2006, and we used the year prior to experiment with different approaches to working together as a group – which was not something that came naturally to us. During that year we had shows in Milan, Dumbo and at our own gallery at the Space. In Dumbo, three of our members erected a large wheatpaste wall and collage – evocative of our own wheatpaste wall at the studio (and which has actually since been brought back to the space and has become an extension of the ‘real’ wheatepaste wall!)
With this exhibition, we began to see how useful the wheatpaste collage was in expressing who we were, as a collective. That’s not to say that all 1026ers print or that all members are equally represented in the mural – but in general, the effect accomplished speaks to the way in which community and individuality intersect in our creative lives, and define our relationship to the group and to one another.
We continued in this vein at Yerba Buena, where we made a 30 foot long ‘wheatpaste wall’ of individual posters in a large grid, a video loop compiled by two members that showed the space in action, and we held a free cake party the Saturday afternoon following the opening. The center of our installation was an 80ft long wheatpaste mural with additional finished works hung over. With this mural, individual images jump out at different points here or there, yet the overall effect of the entire piece overshadows all of these separate elements. This overall aesthetic is evocative of the Space’s split function as both a group of individuals and as a collective voice.
Our most recent collaboration was part of the Locally Localized Gravity Show at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art. With this exhibition, we were able to create our most unified installation to date. It was modeled after a magical tree-fort village and includes thousands of hand printed cardboard shingles, three rope bridges made out of braided plastic bags, wooden turrets, plush video booths, a ziggurat made out of cardboard boxes, and lots more.
In many respects, the cardboard shingles created a multitudinous energy that permeated throughout the space, and helped us achieve the feel of an environment built by diverse individuals working together. At one and the same time, none of the shingles stand out as separate, yet they all operate as unique works of art. They create a sea of individual creations whose effect is exponentially increased in their creative ‘cooperation’, defining the landscape that belongs to them, as components of one social space.

Indexiphilia: Space 1026 comes to BravinLee programs
We are excited to work with BravinLee programs to produce our next collaborative installation. In an effort to capture the energy and excitement that goes into our creative process, the creation of the installation will be open to visitors and will be well documented. Our aim is to share more than just the final product of our efforts, and we wish to include all aspects of its making. We will arrive at the gallery with large rolls of white paper, silkscreens with patterns created by our studio-mates burned into them, ink, pens, paint, and sewing supplies. From there, we will get to work printing, drawing and painting layer upon layer of patterns and textures onto the paper. Throughout the process, the paper will be cut-up and then re-sewn together until we have eventually created one, single piece of re-sewn paper that will cover the entire gallery with our ménage of patterns. A steady flow of Space 1026ers will join us, as well as other artist-friends that we will invite, making the entire process into a large art-party.
We hope that visitors will get a sense of the excitement and energy that is crucial to our working together, and in our creative environment. It is impossible to know what the end result will look like – we’ve never done anything like this before – but we’re excited to get to work and find out ourselves!

-Jesse Goldstein, member Space 1026