By: Regional Relationships, Matthew Friday & Claire Pentecost
Publisher: Chicago & Urbana, IL: Regional Relationships, 2011
Pages: n/a
Dimensions: various
Cover: see descriptions below
Binding: see descriptions below
Process: see descriptions below
Color: see descriptions below
Edition Size: 150
ISBN: none

About Regional Relationships

Regional Relationships commissions artists, scholars, writers and activists to create works that investigate the natural, industrial and cultural landscapes of a region. It is a platform to re-imagine the spaces and cultural histories around us. An invitation to join in seeing what we can learn—and learning what we can see—by juxtaposing spaces and narratives that are usually kept apart.

Popular beliefs about human geography are composed of binary oppositions like “urban” and “rural” and “cosmopolitan” and “provincial”. These divisions naturalize synthetic borders and harden political boundaries, obsfucating their cultural function. Applying a regional lens encourages us to think more expansively about the disparate geographies that might exist within the space of one small town or across continents and oceans.

RR01

Regional Relationships is pleased to launch its inaugural mailing with Matthew Friday's A Map Without Boundaries. Part history, part contemplation, part instruction, this project queries the "entangled collectives" made up of territory, species and events that exist in the Ohio River Valley. Friday suggests that our everyday use of resources makes ancient history active and simultaneously creates our future.

Along with his own map, the artist has enclosed tools (paper, pen, brush and a pigment derived from Ohio's abandoned mines) that can be used to visualize these dynamics in our own regions. These drawings are being collected by Friday as part of a larger exhibition.

Contents of mailing:

Iron Oxide Pigment (from reclaimed acid mine drainage) + fountain pen/brush in a cotton sack; printed map and instructions for creating your own drawing; pre-addressed/postage paid envelope for returning drawings to the artist

RR02

RR02 is "Greetings from the Cornbelts," a postcard project by artist and scholar Claire Pentecost.

While most of the corn surrounding Pentecost's home town of Chicago has been scientifically engineered for local products like ethanol, corn syrup and animal feed, it leaves footprints far beyond the US Midwest. Crossing into territories not immediately visible from the cornfields of Illinois or Iowa, its influence can be found in the rural communities of Mexico where maize has been cultivated for countless generations.

Contents of mailing:

RR02 consists of a series of five postcards documenting Pentecost's research and travels in Mexico, along with a poster and archival envelope.