from   POTHOLES  to  POTS OF   Gold

 

            Nearly every day I ride my bike along the Lake Shore path.  Sometimes I am riding to and from my job at Navy Pier.  Sometimes I am riding to and from school in the loop.  Either way I take the lake front.  It’s fast, it’s efficient and it’s beautiful.  But you have to be careful, aware and weary of the cracks, dips and potholes along the way.  There are five potholes in particular which I dread passing.  Especially at night.

            I have friends who also ride their bikes on the path and they have gotten flat tires from the angry potholes.  I worry about catching one and wiping out.  I’m sure other riders have similar fears. 

            Much of my work has a process base in DIY labor.  In the past it was mainly domestic, however recently it has bridged the realm of hard manual labor when I refinished a deck on my roof and was exploring the line between art and craft.  This project, along with a DIY history scroll I made, got me thinking about art as community activism.

            In the spirit of DIY, I decided to fix the potholes myself.  I conducted research on pavement repair but still needed a way to insert myself more into the project.  That was when I came up with the title “From Potholes to Pots of Gold” and decided after I fixed the potholes I would spray-paint them gold and wheat paste a print from a hand carved stamp of the title.  On the roof where I refinished the deck we project movies every Tuesday and I made a giant marquee sign which I wheat pasted on the wall, so applying the small placards will not be uncharted territory.

            Also in thinking about gold, and my work with community activist art, in 2011 I started a project where I spray painted empty cans of peas gold and stenciled “GRITS” onto the side.  Then I littered the cans throughout the city in places where there were a lot of cigarette butts, in an effort to encourage people to throw away their grits.

            In a figurative therapeutic sense, I think filling a pothole and essentially decorating it relates to the process of healing thru art.  You are filling the void that was created by trauma with the therapy and you are improving your self-esteem and life by spray-painting it gold.

            And so on Thursday August 7th 2014, in the afternoon I went to home depot and bought 50 pounds of pothole repair.  I rode my bike and after I purchased the items, I found I had bought more than I could carry, so I returned 25 pounds and rode fro Roosevelt to Navy Pier with my materials.  I worked the night shift at my job, and clocked out just before midnight.  With two other artists serving as the documenting/watch out assistants, we biked to the pothole location.  The project had to be executed at night because I believe that this type of activism is considered illegal.  The questionable legality lies in the fact that I was spray-painting the repaired potholes and the title placards.  We rode our bikes for convenience, speed of escape and literal reference to solving the problem being addressed.  Because it was night, we brought flashlights so that I could more clearly undergo the action at hand.  We did not turn on the flashlights till we got to the site.  When we arrived at the location, I got off my bike and immediately got to work.  I took the lid off the repair asphalt and, using a tool, scooped out the contents until the hole was filled, leveling out the material in order to smooth the application.  I repaved/repaired three pot holes in all (as opposed to the five in my original plan) due to lack of materials.  When I completed the first three, my intention was to go back and finish the final two later in the week.  After the three potholes had the latexite applied to them, I took out the spray-paint (Gold in color) and went about spray-painting each repaired hole gold.  Even though the repair mix was still wet when I painted it, I believed it would act as an aid in a more permanent color bond.

            While I was spray painting the internal structures of each pothole, I also laid down the stencil (which said

from POTHOLES to POTS OF GOLD) next to each pothole and painted it (in gold) one on each side of the hole (so you could read it from both directions).  I look at the stencil as a type of titling placard for the work, like you see in museums.  I chose the stencil over the spam because of its durability over wheat paste and its speedy application over stamping on pavement.

            All together the work took about 30 minutes.  I finished just as a police car was approaching from the north end of the bike path.  We quickly mounted our bikes and rode away undisturbed.  The next day I was very anxious to ride my bike to my job and view the work in the daytime.  When I passed the spots however I found that overnight the city had come and undergone their own pothole repair over my crude artistic one.  In addition to that, they fixed the remaining potholes I had not gotten to.  Upon closer inspection of the city repairs, I noticed at the edges of many of them you can still see the edge of my title placards.  I am not upset about the city fixing the potholes after me, because they did a much better more professional job than I could have ever done.  I am proud that my work was ultimately what pushed them to correctly repair the potholes, which should have been fixed long ago.  At the end of the day, I fell like I accomplished what I set out to do and even though it doesn’t look exactly as I envisioned it, they still went:

from

POT HOLES
to

POTS OF

GOLD