Becoming American is the first annual exhibition project of cefalonia. A non-profit organization dedicated to bringing international contemporary art to the Pacific Northwest through site-specific projects, the organization was founded by architect Aaron Bush, artist Cat Clifford, and curator Fionn Meade. Taking its name from the birthplace of Juan de Fuca (b. 1536 as Ioannis Phokas on the Ioanian island of Kefalonia), cefalonia is committed to working with artists and locales that reveal issues of ecology and the socio-political climate of our time while promoting public discourse through the presentation of challenging art.
For this exhibition, Gretchen Frances Bennett created Air, the free or unconfined space above the surface of the earth, an essay set in the weeks directly following 9-11, as two youngish graduate students wander New York City together. The narrator doesn’t betray any of her bereavement around the world event of the World Trade Center towers but saves it for her personal interactions with her friend, Hill. There’s a kind of excessive normality, for creating the feeling of someone who finds herself in a foreign or strange place, on a kind of trip, where pleasure isn’t necessarily the point, but is felt in snatches anyway, and of her really wanting someone to share it with or tell it to. This personal story unfolds against the backdrop of a larger event, 9-11, but the larger event isn’t the subject. The focus is on the underlying emotional output of the lives lived, through the narrator’s point of view, tracing the origins of her creative sensibilities, and of what she believes in, especially about herself.
Becoming American was held on San Juan Island, Washington, US, and installed between the two historic military sites of the English and American Camps. The essay was researched and developed between San Juan Island and Brooklyn, New York, and supplanted island history with a personal story set in New York. The newsprint broadsheet was installed, and two readings performed, in the American Camp site project organized by Cat Clifford with Lynne McCabe and Ruth Robbins.
digital version of Air: the free or unconfined space above the surface of the earth
