Flateral Distance
by Nikolai Noel & Matt Shelton

Flat Earthers brings together artworks from artists and writers around the globe, responding to Aotearoa New Zealand artist John Lake's documentation of the 2019 Flat Earth Conference - an international gathering of people who believe the Earth is flat.

John Lake's To The Ends of The (Flat) Earth is presented on this website, built during the lead up to the 2020 election campaigns in Aotearoa and the USA. Between July and September 2020, John's photographs and 'research' into misinformation in the 'information age', will become a provocation for artists to render contours of truth, using poetics and polemics to navigate landscapes of fear and possibilities of fearlessness.

The website will be updated over the coming months with posts from contributors: work in progress; source material; texts; and recordings of public programming, including panel discussions and events hosted at Whiti o Rehua School of Art. These updates will be shared via the Flat Earthers Facebook page and Te Whare H?ra International Artists' Residency's Instagram account. In September 2020 an e-book designed by Kerry Ann Lee will be launched through The Engine Room Gallery. This project is being developed with generous support from Te Whare H?ra International Artists' Residency, The Engine Room, and Creative New Zealand.

In 2021, Flat Earthers will become an in real life exhibition at The Engine Room gallery, Whiti o Rehua School of Art at Toi R?uwharangi College of Creative Arts in P?neke Wellington.

Flat Earthers Unpleasant Truths / Comfortable Lies

http://flatearthers.space/

How do you create an image of a person that you think you know fairly well, from a position that acknowledges a great distance between you?

Our research for Flat Earthers grows out of a larger collaborative project. For going on nine years, we've been asking the question of whether it's possible to assemble a coherent image of the other in one's own mind. This emerged after seeing a large series of Mickalene Thomas's drawings at Lehman Maupin in Soho on a grad school class trip to New York City with visiting faculty Lisi Raskin in 2011. (Lisi is also a contributor to Flat Earthers.) As soon as we started drawing, we realized how complicated that proposition of imagining each other was. The image of the other in one's own mind is a provisional, bricolaged image that you fashion in an ad hoc manner, as needed, with what you already have in mind.

How do you create an image of a person that you think you know fairly well, from a position that acknowledges a great distance between you? How do you flatten that curve? A bent curve view? A flat earth-point view?

Our starting place might be to go to the highest point in our area in elevation and orient ourselves in the direction of the other and draw each other remotely. 3400ft and 3100 ft elevation respectively, a couple of hundred feet distance elevation-wise (Nikolai will have to draw up, LOL), a kind of flat earth theory, that ignores the lateral/”flateral distance” of something like 2177 miles distance between Charlottesville and Port of Spain.

As we tiptoe to the edges of this idea in the coming months, we're going to be sharing images, and images of images, with each other. Some of the images of images have made it here, to this post of work in progress. We will also be percolating some other experiments, most of which will likely collect as a small pile of loose ends that may or may not cohere into a conceptual rope ladder down the road.

Nikolai M. Noel (b. 1976, Port of Spain, lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago), and Matthew P. Shelton (b. 1982, Danbury, NC, USA, lives in Charlottesville, VA, USA) use collaboration as a platform from which to speculate about the interrelationship of history, place, embodiment, and the self from their respective positions as a person of color from the West Indies and a white American man. Using materials that blur the line between the concrete and the metaphoric, their collaboration explores questions of power, agency, memory, and subjectivity through strategies of abstraction and representation. Their collaboration manifests as an ongoing conversation from their remote locations via WhatsApp, punctuated by episodes of intense in-residence art making and reflection. Their collaborative projects have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, ME, USA; 1708 Gallery in RIchmond, VA, USA; Alice Yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad; and at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA, USA.

Other Links:

http://flatearthers.space/

http://flatearthers.space/2020/07/flateral-distance-nikolai-noel-matt-shelton