Micro Plot
A Secret Plot moves operations into the streets to instigate random encounters with art
It has finally happened, A Secret Plot has moved into the streets with a variation on the ‘micro gallery.’ These boxes will hold temporary artist ‘installations’ in a semi-anonymous manner in the streets of Ojai for the foreseeable future. The mission of the project is to move challenging art into semi-public spaces where art is not expected to exist. The idea is to generate chance encounters with the strange, uncanny, and radical notions of art, outside of galleries, museums and institutional spaces and to give artists a chance to create work, exhibit, and communicate concepts in non-traditional ways.
The idea for Micro Plot came to me in the beginning months of the Pandemic, it just took a while to materialize in concrete form. But the story of how it came about goes back years. When we still lived in Santa Barbara, I used to walk past a house that looked as though it was abandoned. It wasn’t, but it had the ‘look’, overgrown vegetation, unkempt yard, peeling paint, dingy windows. The last paint job seemed like it happened sometime in 1976. In the evenings a single light could be seen through the front window, betraying the presence of the occupants. But outside was another ‘tell’, a small white box perched on a four by four staked into the ground, in the middle of the front yard, two or three feet away from the picket fence. Inside the box were displayed random newspaper clippings and notes, presumably from the owner(s). The clippings and messages would change with time, but the whole concept of this ‘message board’ was ultimately intriguing. I never understood any of the clippings that were cut out of decades-old newspapers, or the messages. The messages may have been unclear, but the idea wasn’t
We’re all familiar with the tiny library concept – small wooden boxes, usually near mail boxes, filled with random and cast away books – and the ‘take a book, leave a book’ idea. Micro Plot is something along the lines of ‘leave an idea, take an idea’, and so far the feedback has been mostly positive, although Bart’s did apparently receive a complaint that the first box made someone ‘uncomfortable’. I’d venture to say that even that can be seen as a positive development, especially if the whole notion of the project is to put out challenging ideas.
Till next time!
