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The Project
Artist Ingrid Calame will launch this community-based initiative with a major project that transforms imagery gathered in and around the city into an exhibition installation at the Gallery. Calame visited Buffalo for three weeks to complete a project for our community called Step on a Crack.... Buildings now belonging to ArcelorMittal Steel that were built for Bethlehem Steel, the Gallery parking lot with its many repairs, and other sites to be determined will all be part of her tracing process.
How do we understand a whole from its parts?
- Ingrid Calame
How do we understand Buffalo from its past?
The working title of the residency had been Buffalo Trace. Back in her Los Angeles studio, in preparation for making the drawings and paintings that will make up the exhibition, Calame laid out hundreds of square feet of drawings that she and her team of tracers made while battling rain, wind, sun, and the heat generated by steel production for three weeks in June 2008. The quickly assembled tracing team navigated through the rules and regulations of each unique tracing site, and the resulting drawings held the experience of Buffalo in a working steel mill, in its abandoned grain elevators, in the tarred and re-tarred AKAG parking lot, in a dilapidated wading pool, and somehow also through the eyes of the students at two local schools and a community center who met Calame and learned about her work. Through weeks of painting and drawing, the artist said that her thoughts turned “playfully morbid,” seeing the drawings both as evocations of “decades of loss and disintegration of those places, but also as raw material for the childhood game that begins with the words, ‘Step on a crack . . . .’” The Western New York environments she traced, retraced, and painted have kept their integrity, but the resulting work evokes a more universal mindfulness. As Calame commented, "the traced numbers, paint, and cracks, like individual workers in a factory or children playing games, have retained their integrity, but have stopped short of being symbols—they are captured images that combine history, physical fact, decay, memory, and personal experience.”