What is it?
Roseville-Electric engages citizens with the electric landscape in Central Park through taking citizen portraits, creating an electric-art-cache scavenger hunt in Central Park, and performing temporary landscape installations in the park during community events. These activities will be woven into a short documentary art film broadcast back to the city at public venues like events at the Oval, and the green home remodeling fair as a memento for reflection about the place of electricity in Roseville. An accompanying website documents the process and serves as an online gallery.
Roseville-Electric is a work of public art exploring the electric landscape of Roseville, Minnesota. Electricity connects us—from the personal landscape of electric appliances, through the power-lines that give Roseville’s skyline its character, and beyond to the landscapes of the electric plants that power the toasters, coffee-makers, TV’s and vacuum cleaners in Roseville homes. The tone is light-hearted and uses humor to create a comfortable atmosphere for conversation and reflection.
Creators:
Jonee Kulman Brigham, Artist, Full Spring Studio
Audrey Robinson Favorito, Media Producer
Partners:
The team is working with Roseville Parks and Recreation Department as a community liaison to identify partners and engage the community.
Funding: In process – sponsorship packages are available.
Contact: jonee@fullspringstudio.com and follow the project at www.roseville-electric@blogspot.com
Approach
Why Power Lines? We can’t change our relationship with energy if we don’t look at it and talk about it. Electric infrastructure is often seen as an industrial side effect to our way of life and ignored as unfortunate, exposed, “backstage” material. But it is anything but backstage and is often a dominant element in our urban landscape. Instead of tuning it out, what insights might we gain by accepting its visibility and reflecting on the complex and sometimes contradictory stories and values it represents about our culture – our interdependencies, the gifts of electricity in modern life, and the corresponding shadow impacts of that gift. By looking closer instead of turning away, perhaps we can better integrate power lines into our cultural identity and our physical landscapes. By offering space for a personal and place-based connection with the larger energy landscape, perhaps we can also offer opportunities to make individual energy impacts less abstract and more meaningful.
Why Roseville? Transmission towers and power lines are prominent in the skyline of Roseville, reinforcing the east-west spine of the city as they march along County Road C. Power lines also interweave into the natural vistas and recreation spaces of Central park, as a backdrop to trees, lakes, and playgrounds. Roseville presents an opportunity to explore the role of electricity in life and landscape with its impressive sustainability initiatives and community engagement in the arts and the outdoors.
