Elbow Room
Dialtones Contributing Artists: Endale Abraham, Shannon Anderson, Ricky Bearghost, Aaron Bokowski, Chanel Conklin, Taylor Forzano, Emma Ganger-Spivak, Aaron Hobson, Robert Hubert, Andy Louie, Sean McGinley, Brian Moran, Elmeater Morton, Mohamed Omar, Amy Osborn, Joanna Rodriguez, Joel Stotesbery
(Portland, OR)
Dialtones
Access: PICA's Resource Room is on the first floor of the building and accessible to those with mobility aids. ADA Wheelchair accessible bathrooms are on site. Learn more about access at TBA:26 here.
DESCRIPTION
If telecommunications is the defining project of the 20th century, then you can make a case for the phone booth as its paradigmatic architectural form. Equal parts confessional and pulpit, foxhole and podium, these glass pockets of privacy in the midst of public life came to embody the contradictions of a world newly made over by radio waves and telephone wires. As telecommunications crept beyond the public square and into the home via landlines and TV sets, the phone booth began to fall into obsolescence. By the new millennium, the project to redistrict human life had turned inward, spurning the old world in favor of a new one constructed inside the telephone itself, and the phone booth had become, like the catapult and the cowboy hat, an object of fiction. Clark Kent steps into a phone booth as a mild-mannered reporter and steps out as Superman. In Harry Potter, a phone booth serves as a portal from the human world to the Ministry of Magic. In 1989, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter use a phone booth to slip through time in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and ten years later, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss use a phone booth to slip in and out of The Matrix.
Today, when an empty phone booth rings on a deserted street, it is as if a white rabbit appears, announcing a hole in the ordinary where we can crawl through to make our escape.
Which brings us to the hole at hand: TELBOW. How did it arrive, and where does it lead? Is it a friendly place? Who are these characters on the other end of the phone, and what is the purpose of their bits? Why is this Brian guy so crude? Who is Shannon, and is she qualified to give me advice? Is this conceptual? Is anyone in charge? Was that a Tommy Tutone cover?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Founded in 2020, Elbow Room is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community art studio and gallery dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. More than 30 participating artists visit Elbow Room’s SE Portland studio (and satellite community art programming) each week to develop their creative practice, experiment with new materials, cultivate their portfolio of finished artwork, and build community through friendship and collaboration. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media/video, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of art making. Participating artists pay no out-of-pocket expenses for materials or studio access, and they have opportunities to show and sell their work through Elbow Room’s gallery and through Elbow Room’s efforts to network with other contemporary art spaces.