I’m very excited to talk about both of these project—Cite to Excite and Justin’s piece— during our week on design and art.

So many things at once!

citetoexcite:

“Every landscape is a hermetic narrative” -Lucy Lippard

Now we’re rollin’. Today’s entry is from a great designer I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the past year…Justin Flood. He’s worked pretty closely with some of the people in my MFA program, designing great pieces like this.

Here’s his explanation for his contribution for Cite to Excite:

Hi Jason,

I’ve been lucky enough spend this last week with the good folks at the Epicenter, a resource center for affordable housing and small businesses and a hub for community based art, design and architecture projects in Green River, Utah.

It was pretty amazing to witness the work of a small group of young professionals so committed to and engaged with their place and community on so many levels. Green River has a population of just 953 and this creates an interesting, intimate (and sometimes overly intimate) dynamic. Folks know their neighbors, they know their mayor, they know the postal workers and the servers at the diner. In a bigger city, community can feel like more of a concept than a reality, but on such a small scale the sense of community is unavoidable. This creates a dynamic which is both wonderful and warm and potentially challenging for an outsider.

In my time in Green River the Epicenter crew attended a monthly meeting with the city council and the chamber of commerce. We spoke with folks in neighboring cities about approaches to community and business development. The organization is in the midst of constructing a Habitat for Humanity house as well as several design projects for local businesses: everything from creating menus and online presence to painting exterior signage and drafting site plans for a new fire department building.

I spent one of my final days taking a series of these funky photos in the desert with my new friend and epicenter co-founder Jack Forinash. It was a fun, intuitive and experimental project with no real final product in mind, so I thank you for giving the photo a place to exist. It think its a pretty fitting pairing with the quote from Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local, a text which I’ve been enamored with since the author’s inspiring PASPMLS lecture in October.

Best,

Justin