Amy Balkin/David Buuck intro

I am very excited to get to introduce both David and Amy tonight, because these are two artists whose work has impacted me quite deeply and also I really hold both of them up as models of the real work place-based artmaking can and should do. Amy’s projects include “Public Smog” – which creates public parks in the atmosphere through the purchase and retirement of emissions offsets; “This is the Public Domain,” through which she continues to explore legal and sub-legal avenues for turning the ownership of property to the collective commons; and “Invisible-5,” an illuminating and captivating audio tour of sites along I-5 that have been the subject of various environmental justice efforts. Not a mere collection of facts and figures, I-5 captures the stories, the sounds, the lives that intertwine with and define these locations. It is a public project that, in the end, is quite personal.

David, too, strikes this delicate and moving balance between the communally and individually meaningful in his work. He has led several (de)tours around the Bay Area – with a focus on the hidden and multi-layered histories of often overlooked sites, movements and moments. Buried Treasure Island is his most recent project. Included in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 5 exhibit, BTI included a guidebook, audio tour, exhibit and live tour of this man-made island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.

While quite distinct, there are many overlapping concerns in both Amy and David’s work. Foremost among these, I would say, is their shared interest in the absolute essentiality of invisible spaces. Whether thinking of spaces that are literally not perceptible to the naked eye or those that have been quite deliberately erased from public concern or memory, David and Amy seek to bring or return these sites to our collective and individual conscious and consciousness. To do so, they dig very, very deep – and I don’t mean just through information and official histories, though they certainly do that difficult work, in incredibly thoughtful ways, but on a much more evocative and, I think, generous level, they dig through their own convictions and beliefs and motivations and visions. There is a palpable sense in both David’s and Amy’s work that the artists are intensely connected to these places they ponder and interrogate – and this is no small feat when you realize that, in Amy’s case, that place has been the entire Earth and its atmosphere. As a grateful participant in these artists’ works (for David and Amy, there are no spectators) I can personally say that the rigor and utter sincerity with which these explorations are undertaken has affected me profoundly. The other day, I was sitting down at the ferry docks in San Francisco, and when I looked across at Treasure Island, I felt this longing, this strong desire to return. I’ve looked at that island any number of times before and, while I’ve always been interested in the place, I’ve never felt that way. It’s David’s work that did that to me—I experienced the island with him, through him, and now I feel deeply invested in its past, its overlapping histories, its use, its misuse, its uncertain futures. I feel the same way now about sites along I-5—I can’t think of the city of Livermore now without thinking about groundwater contamination—radioactive groundwater contamination. And that may sound very technical, but it’s so much more than that. In David and Amy’s work, the data, the terminology, the official maps and documents stand in service to the lives – individual and collective lives – affected, often altered, by the agendas, actions and inactions the “official” information represents (or, often, obscures). David and Amy’s work is intellectual, certainly, but just as importantly, it’s visceral. They both emobody the best mix of activist, artist, documentarian. But I think another key to the deep impact of their work is their willingness—their insistence, really--on taking on a fourth critical role, one that I think can be the riskiest of all, and one which can really fail you if you don’t embrace it with absolute conviction, which they both absolutely do. And that is the role of citizen. There is a true sense in both David’s and Amy’s work that this role is inextricable from the others. To be an artist is not just to be a citizen, in all its complexity, but to continually question what that means and how one goes about it – how can and should one act and be and live and interact as a citizen of the Bay Area, of the United States, of the world, of global and globalized culture? This is just one of many intersecting inquiries I see in David’s and Amy’s work.