Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In this paper, I share Craftowne, a visual novel which is an interactive installation combining text and various media–printmaking, drawing, sculpture, crafts, found objects, and sound–to tell the narrative of a planned suburban community outside Washington, DC during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Craftowne exists as both a gallery installation and a limited-edition comic book. Craftowne is a comic book that the reader can walk into and participate in, a work situated at the intersection of visual art, literature, theatre, and storytelling. Craftowne is symbolic of America as a whole. It is loosely based on the actual town in Maryland where I grew up, and the impact that the town has had on me as a person and artist. The individual pieces in the Craftowne installation are interactive and require the viewer to actively engage with them either by reading text and/or physically manipulating the work. The goal of these pieces is to move the viewer from passive participant to active participant and to implicate the viewer in the work itself thus making the audience member a performer for other viewers in the gallery space. This paper discusses the use of the audience member as a performer in the gallery space, visual art as a forum to explore identity and place, text in gallery art, the traditional “white cube” of the gallery space as a book, hybrid works that exist in multiple forms, and written text as a form of drawing.