Process is trust in not knowing, which has its risks to be sure but also its amazing rewards.  The process of not knowing when you start a project—what it will be, how it will look, what form it will take, will it work—is guided by purpose: why it is urgent and necessary to make an exhibition, to think about a place and its people in a way that only artists and art can.  Thus, for this process, there is the necessity of driving questions and clear intent.   

Projects that emanate from and address a given context—a place—make that place at the same time a platform for communication.  And framing experience within a place enables us at once to be a witness to our own world and to perceive it in ways never possible before.   

Public practice is a constant process of negotiation among artists, commissioners (like InSite) and (depending on level of perception one possesses and transparency of functions one provides along the way) among every single person from every sector a project touches in a community.  This is the nature of artmaking in public and this is the public practice of curating.  It is a discursive process out of which conflicts are mediated but also meanings emerge—sometimes multiple and unresolved ones, even conflictual meanings.  And it is remains discursive, living on in horizontal conversations* that are continuous and without end.  

So, temporal works meant for the moment of the exhibition continue to exist in ways not fully known to us.   After a site exhibition closes we have to keep going to catch up with what projects put in motion, in thought.  This can take some time: reviewing and reflecting on the process and the meanings of the work; making time and spaces to revisit and think about the stories that arose in the process and why they matter so much, remain so present and vital to this art practice.  This publication is one such space.

* By way of distinction, vertical conversations lead to an accumulation or progressive result; horizontal conversations has a different effect of expansion; each is to be valued in its own way.   This concept of conversations was put forth by artist Hirokazu Kosaka of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center at the consortium meting of “Awake” Art, Buddhism, and The Dimensions of Consciousness” on October 25, 2001.