Artist Statement

Set against a global backdrop of cities that are investing in alternative transportation systems designed to relieve pollution, congestion, obesity and transportation inequality, Bike Date and Rest Stop Bike Repair Shop, seeks to address these social, cultural and material tensions through a critical inquiry staged as performance research that is a conflation of art and everyday life.

As an artist, I draw on the data of the lived bodily experiences of the bicyclist in order to reveal the complexity of social-spatial relations embodied in the nonmotorized roadway. Through doing so I am specifically interested to challenge urban design and transportation policies that create hegemonically fraught roadway spaces. Such institutionalized design processes, like those found inurban planning, whether top-down or participatory, tend to be abstracted, wherethe embodied experience of the roadway users are not considered in the planning discourse. Drawing a white line on a road and calling it a bike lane is one thing. Actually navigating this lane andencountering all the problematic and dangerous obstacles and intersections in the ‘lane’ is another, very different thing. My projects are an effort to bring the second, lived experience into the planning process through my performance.
Casting others’ and myself as the quantified interface with the roadway systems using audio recording, photography and interviews, I track the mental and physical experiences of others’ and myself while on the roadway. My projects Rest Stop Bike Repair Shop, and Bike Date become platforms for promoting a phenomenological approach to critical roadway design from a ground up, grass roots-based activist art practice, thereby disrupting the prominent abstraction of the embodied experience in the literature around current planning discourses.
I use performance as research and function in the roles of repairperson, facilitator, date, listener, activist, and sometimes spectacle, which allows me to engage with other roadway users. By enacting these multiple provider roles I provoke a critical discourse in the public sphere–one that starts with my own embodied experience and radiates out to problematize subjectivity in the space of the roadway, equally engaging motorist, cyclist and the many other inhabitants of roadway spaces.
In my short talk I will introduce and explain the component parts of my project, Rest Stop Bike Repair Shop and Bike Date individually, and explain how they work together. I will describe the project process, my personal experience, and provide interpretations of transcription excerpts. With the intention of igniting new dialogue that addresses a phenomenological approach to critical roadway design and urban planning processes, I will demonstrate that the artistic practice as research is necessary in order that learning can take place at the level of roadway planning and social action.

• Laura Curry works by analyzing the problems affecting glocalized communities defined by economic, political and gender structures. In each of her projects, Curry seeks to include diverse narratives that touch on social specificities that links non-conventional methods of research and activism. Laura has been presented at NoAutomatico/ Monterrey, Mexico; Open Engagement at Queens Museum/ Queens NY; ISEA2012 Albuquerque NM; Time Mutations, Buffalo/ NY; On the Boards/Seattle WA; Hugo House/ Seattle WA; TBA Festival for Portland Institute on Contemporary Art/ Portland OR; The Southern Theater/ Minneapolis MN, and ODC/ San Francisco, through the SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance; DOCUMENTA 13/ Kassel Germany; Time Mutations, Bauhaus-Universität/Weimar; Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology/ Michoacan Mexico. lauracurry.com