Mary Corey March

International Exquisite Corps Project

Mixed Media Online International Collaborative Project created for the Transcultural Exchange Center's "Here, There and Everywhere: Anticipating the Future of Art" show. (2009)

About

The Exquisite Corps project is based off of the classical DaDA/Surrealist drawing exercise “Exquisite Corpse” in which one artist begins a drawing and passes it on to another to add to. There have been many variations on the rules, but that is the essential aspect. Exquisite Corps gives meaning to the original nonsense words by simply dropping an “e”. "Exquisite" meaning carefully selected or flawlessly executed, while "Corps" is a group of people with a common activity acting under common direction.

Process:

Tree Diagram

Artists who joined the project participated in a form of the Exquisite Corpse exercise online. They were invited to use any media that could be translated into 2D and uploaded for other artists to alter. Because of the digital nature of the work this project (unlike the original exercise) could track multiple variations on the same drawings, creating branches of interpretations of single pieces that formed "trees".

Each artist:

  • submited one beginning stage work-in-progress (represented by a black rectangle in this diagram).
  • added to at least three pieces without finishing them,/li>
  • finished at least one piece (marked by a black frame both online and in the gallery installation of the "trees")
    • .

    There was no limit to how many they could alter and finish.

    Participants

    Participating artists were invited from all over the world based on information I was able to find online. They were selected to form as diverse a group as possible in style, media, location, identity, age, conceptual framework and career experience. There were limitations, especially at the time as to who I could reach online and work with via translations (for example, finding even a single participant in the entire continent of Africa failed despite my best efforts).

    Artists: Jose Luis Anzizar (Argentina), Peng Bo (China), Megan Faye (Scotland), Michela Griffo (USA), Aldo Carhuancho Herrera (Peru), John Himmelfarb (USA), Mary Corey March (USA), Annysa Ng (Hong Kong/USA), Jan Kolling (Netherlands), Sachin Kondhalkar (India), Lorenzo Noccioli (Italy), Cereinyn Ord (England / Canada), Shaida Parveen (Pakistan / England), Javier Puertolas (Spain), Renate Reisky (Germany), Ewa Robel (Poland), Constantion Severin (Romania), Simone Stoll (Germany), Gosia Wlodarczak (Australia), Andreas A. Zingerlie (Austria).

    Programmer: Chris Saari