Meeting Ground:
Yard of the Yard
Yard of the Yard is a Meeting Ground collaborative project that invites artists and non-artists to point a camera at the ground and share one yard (36 X 36 inches) of their yards via recorded and live streaming video. The project asks participants to consider a patch of ground and the actions or impacts they make on their “yard” and the soil.
Current Feature
Yard of the Yard
featured in
A Time For Collaboration
For the exhibition at the Kramer Gallery, a video comprised of selected footage and audio from selected participants’ videos and photographs weaves together performances, simple acts of touching, and attentive observations of one yard by one yard plots of ground into a common yard of shared space.
The version of Yard of the Yard featured in A Time For Collaboration includes selections from:
Sobia Ahmad, Silver Spring, Maryland
Ahmad Afararja, Mia Eva Rollow, and EDELOmigrante, I Am Worthy of Life, Dheisha Refugee Camp, West Bank, Palestine
Mary Baumann, Powell, Wyoming
Inga Bragadottir, Rockville, Maryland
Alexander D’Agostino, Spell, Baltimore, Maryland
Maggie Gourlay, Bethany Beach, Delaware
Yunjeong Hong, Zinnias, Purdue, Indiana
Lauren Hubbard, Derwood, Maryland
Betsy Lohrer Hall, Long Beach, California
Katie Kehoe, Toronto and Cape Breton artifacts, Canada
Nara Park, Washington, D.C.
Ken Main, After The Graze Before The Butterfly, Patagonia, Arizona
Susan Main, Derwood and Olney, Maryland and Roberts, Montana
Frank McCauley, Spirit Plot, Rockville, Maryland
MJ Neuberger, Governor’s Island, New York, New York
Betsy Ritz, Lincoln, Rhode Island
Amanda Rockler and Andres Ovalle-Campos, Sandy Spring, Maryland
Lynn Silverman, Union Cemetery, East Berlin, Pennsylvania
Patricia Underwood, Castleton, Virginia
About Yard of the Yard
The yards are projected in a variety of sites at scale including Swale House and Lab on Governor’s Island, public spaces including schools and community centers, art centers, and telematic performances. Participants are invited to send their soil for analysis if their “yard” is softscape.
The first Yard of the Yard project was a live, telematic performance in 2009 between Rahraw Omarzad, artist and Director of the Center For Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (Kabul, Afghanistan) and Susan Main (artist, Derwood, Maryland). They pointed webcams at the ground and exchanged a one yard by one yard square of their “yards” via the internet. The live videos of their yards were projected onto two 36” X 36” X 6” plinths in Kabul, Afghanistan and at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland.
The yards displaced from their original locations and projected as life-scale representations were placed next to each other in a neutral third space. The act of bringing the two plots and their respective ambient audio environments together virtually opened up discussions about borders, cultural identity, representation, neighbors, perception, connectivity, ownership, and common space among others.
A residency with Project: Soils at SWALE House on Governor’s Island in New York City led to the current iteration of Yard of the Yard as a Meeting Ground project. Participants are artists and non-artists from anywhere in the world who bring a measured plot of ground into focus. A changing presentation of individual “yards” will appear here along with contextual research surrounding individual attention, observation, action, mediation, impact, soil, history, land use policy, and stewardship.
SUSAN MAIN is an artist and curator. Her work explores individual and social contracts between space, time, and attention, pairing the unmediated event with tools that attempt to measure, define, locate and orient. She is the founder of Cultivate, an interdisciplinary collaborative platform driven by investigations of landscape, place, and the commons. She is a 2020 Project: Soils Artist in Residence at Swale House on Governor’s Island (NYC) along with MJ Neuberger.