Community Newly Cultivated

Myohan Oh

Between receiving Clutch from the previous carrier and arriving home with the gallery, I encountered a couple of friends who stopped me on the street and took interest in this unusual vessel containing the Terra/Form exhibition that I held by my side.  I was delighted to know that there were some who were interested in Clutch without any initiation on my part.

Later, I was sitting in my apartment getting ready to go to Wicker Park, and wondering how I would approach strangers and what I would say to engage them in the Clutch exhibition, and ultimately how I would cultivate a community through this experience. I kept opening and closing that 5”x 5”x 5” gallery space, unconsciously thinking that I would see something different each time I opened it. Then Landon Williams’ piece entitled Here came into view and it made me think about what it means to be here and to be in the moment that I’m in. I thought about where I was: my apartment building. I thought about how an apartment building is, in a sense, a community in and of itself. A bunch of people from all different backgrounds and different locations and different stages in life gather and inhabit this one building for the sake of living. Then I thought about how although we (the residents) are in close vicinity to one other, we are still separate; come to think of it, I didn’t know the names of anyone on my floor, let alone who they were.

I decided to jettison the idea of going to Wicker Park with this exhibition and embraced the idea of going around to the other apartment units on my floor, knocking on doors, and getting to know the inhabitants of this so-called community.

The experience came to fruition beautifully. I went from door to door, knocking and awkwardly asking if the resident or residents would be interested in taking a look at this miniature gallery. Obviously not everyone answered their doors because not everyone was home, but overall, I got to know my neighbors. There lives a guy on my floor [for privacy reasons, I will not reveal names] who goes to Columbia and majors in photography and has a very suave taste in hairstyle (apparently there are a lot of Columbia students on my floor). There is a room of three girls who actually have a large poster of a boy band (whose name I can’t remember for the life of me) and play music very often and loud enough to the point where one can hear it from down the hall. I also had no idea that the apartment unit next to mine was vacant: the residents there had moved out very recently; I had only figured this out when the rentor came around and entered that unit that I was waiting in front of so patiently, only to find out that it was completely cleared out and uninhabited.

Through this experience with Clutch, I can confidently say that I had cultivated community in a space where community seemed evident but was in fact absent. This wasn’t a community in the sense that all the residents on my floor got to know each other, but rather it was more personal and for my own gain, that I gained the opportunity to interact with others and to have them open their lives to me while I shared pieces of mine (and classmates’ through the artwork in the gallery). My underlying hope for those on my floor is that my action of knocking and interacting with this exhibition would encourage others to cultivate community as well, not necessarily through presenting pieces of art in a clutch purse, but through whatever means of expression best fit them.