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We
are a collaborative team who have been traversing
America
for the past four years in a 1979 Ford pick up truck and a 1968 travel
trailer. During this time we have created a tangible fiction that revolves
around a family farm, which sponsors a traveling variety show. Blurring the
boundaries between various mediums including photography, performance art,
theatre, interactive installation, and constructed mythologies, we attempt
to make our conceptual narrative real. References include reality
television, traveling tent shows, vintage erotica, cottage industry, and
otherworldly existences. Bushwick Farms exists in the space between illusion
and truth, whatever's imagined becomes real and whatever's real exudes the
dreamlike qualities of imagination.
Tara
Cuthbert and Stuart Solzberg are a married couple obsessed with actualizing
the history and genealogy of a conceptual company they created named
Bushwick Farms. They created this company while living in the Brooklyn
neighborhood of Bushwick, an area known for its desolate industrial
landscape. They began to construct an elaborate history and family tree,
weaving their personal dreams and fantasies into the narrative of Bushwick
Farms.
In 2001, they rented a 15ft truck and moved all of their belongings into a
storage unit in Albuquerque,
New
Mexico.They purchased a pick-up truck and travel trailer, which they transformed
into a mobile studio/home. They placed large white vinyl letters on both
sides of the trailer that read BUSHWICK FARMS. Intrigued by the notion of
blending fact and fiction, they began to live as Joe Rotto and Violet Gray.
Joe Rotto is the youngest of three sons of the Bushwick family and manages The
Traveling Variety Show, which is sponsored by Bushwick Farms. As written
in the history of Bushwick Farms, Joe and Violet began to travel America
recruiting performers for their
Traveling Variety Show.
Bushwick
Farms has presented The Traveling Variety Show in spaces ranging from
parking lots and RV parks to Contemporary
Art
Centers
throughout America.
Components of the show have been exhibited in conjunction with Santa
Fe
Center
for Photography and
Rose
Gallery.
Cuthbert and Solzberg have been Artists in-Residence at The Bemis Center for
Contemporary Arts, The MacDowell Colony, and Visual Studies Workshop. In
2005 they were awarded a grant from the Nevada Arts Council. Bushwick Farms
can be found year-round at www.bushwickfarms.com
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