Participants:
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Felicia Mings
Joost Bosland
Jonathan Garnham
Igshaan Adams
Michal Raz-Russo
Kevin Beasley
Words:
Sara de Beer
Archive:
Zach Viljoen
The Clear Sky project began as a game – a way for our team to connect as we worked in a distributed mode following the temporary closure of A4’s premises in response to the restrictions placed on spaces of artistic production and performance.
The player instructions are simple:
1) Find a piece of clear sky
2) Film for 30 seconds
There may be no view on earth more hopeful than a slice of clear sky.
The project was realised on Instagram, using the social media platform as a space to stage Clear Sky while A4's premises were closed due to Covid-19 lockdown measures. The volatility of Instagram as a platform was interacted with, and content adapted to work inside the collective energy presented by the platform on any given day.
- Yoko Ono. Sky TV, 1966.
When Yoko Ono created Sky TV, the sky was performed as a place of refuge; blue, clear, endless. The eternal sky came indoors (via 24 hour live video feed) with all its promises, conceived of at a time when Ono was living in a windowless apartment.We conceived of ‘clear sky’ as a way to connect under a collage of blues, and asked friends from across the dome to send a thirty second clip of the sky – or what they could see of it – living under various and extraordinary conditions of shelter and confinement. There may be no view on earth more hopeful than a slice of clear sky.This piece of sky is courtesy of Felicia Mings. #a4clearsky@fe_mings#feliciamings@yokoonoofficial#yokoono@andrearosengallery
- Gill Scott-Heron. Whitey on the Moon, 1970.
#a4clearsky#spacex#nasa
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”
- Tracey K. Smith (2011).
Painted in 1965 in New Mexico, Sky Above Clouds IV is made from the stuff of memory, recalling the artist’s aeroplane journeys of the previous decade. One is overcome with the sense of being able to dip into that blue, at once hope and vertigo, in which the clouds are afforded a mass of their own. Though above, the caps of light ground the sky. How else to fall into the immaculate but to dissolve at the periphery?This sky is courtesy of Michal Raz-Russo#a4clearsky@artinstitutechi